Page:Cicero And The Fall Of The Roman Republic.djvu/144

120 may be sure that Cæsar was no less averse to a movement which would have united the Senate and Pompey, the constitutional and the military power, once for all firmly together, and would have postponed indefinitely the chances of revolution. Both Crassus and Cæsar got wind of the plot which was formed inside the ranks of their party. They did their best at first to gain for Catiline an official position which would have enabled him to dispense with actual armed rebellion; when this failed and it was manifest that the conspirators would proceed with their further designs, Cæsar and Crassus both warned Cicero of the danger and gave him such information as they possessed about the plot. The subsequent utterances of both may be cited in evidence of the reality of the conspiracy and the imminence of the danger. When Cæsar fourteen years later wrote of the "ultimum Senatus Consultum" that the State had never had recourse to it saving when "the city was almost in flames and the audacity of malefactors was striking terror into the hearts of all men," he must have been understood by all Rome to refer to Catiline. Crassus is still more explicit. A year after Catiline's death he declared in the Senate: "I owe it to Cicero that I am a senator, that I am a citizen, that I am a free man, that I draw the breath of life; whensoever I look on my wife, on my home, or on my country, I behold a blessing for which I am indebted to him."