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 situation had already come to be this: the Roman dominion must suffer disruption, or the existing Constitution must be abolished. The mob manifestly could not govern, and the aristocracy had given irrefutable proof that they could not govern either. Sulla had framed for them the most favourable conditions that an absolute aristocrat could invent, and the result was universal disorder. Spain had been reduced to temporary submission only by the assassination of Sertorius. The sea was abandoned to buccaneers. "Wolves calling themselves Roman senators" preyed at will upon the wretched people of the provinces. Honest and industrious men were robbed of their hardly-earned property. Their wives and daughters were dishonoured, and protests only provoked fresh outrage. Nor was there any hope for the unhappy victims, since they were not enduring the transient calamity of rule by a bad man—they were under the indefeasible tyranny of a dead hand. The insurrection of the slaves showed how the very foundations of Roman society were heaving beneath it. It was quelled, and six thousand miserable beings were impaled along the sides of the Italian highways; but the deadly disease was not remedied, it was only inflamed, by forcible repression. As the Servile War showed what Rome had to fear from the despair of the lowest, the conspiracy of Catiline revealed the danger which menaced it from the discontents of men more highly placed. Catiline's followers were not only "the dangerous classes," the parricides, adulterers, forgers, brigands, pirates; their