of them even admitted it. But there was no formal trial; and a few hours
after a vote of death had been passed upon them in a hesitating Senate,
Lentulus and Cethegus, two members of that august body, with three of
their companions in guilt, were brought from their separate places of
confinement, with some degree of secrecy (as appears from different
writers), carried down into the gloomy prison-vaults of the Tullianum,[1]
and there quietly strangled, by the sole authority of the consul.
Unquestionably they deserved death, if ever political criminals deserved
it: the lives and liberties of good citizens were in danger; it was
necessary to strike deep and strike swiftly at a conspiracy which extended
no man knew how widely, and in which men like Julius Caesar and Crassus
were strongly suspected of being engaged. The consuls had been armed with
extra-constitutional powers, conveyed by special resolution of the Senate
in the comprehensive formula that they "were to look to it that the state
suffered no damage". Still, without going so far as to call this
unexampled proceeding, as the German critic Mommsen does, "an act of the
most brutal tyranny", it is easy to understand how Mr. Forsyth, bringing
a calm and dispassionate legal judgment to bear upon the case, finds it
impossible to reconcile it with our ideas of dignified and even-handed
justice.[2] It was the hasty instinct of self-preservation, the act of
a weak government uncertain of its very friends, under the influence of
terror--a terror for which, no doubt, there were abundant grounds. When
Cicero stood on the prison steps, where he had waited to receive the
report of those who were making sure work with the prisoners within, and
announced their fate to the assembled crowd below in the single word
"_Vixerunt_" (a euphemism which we can only weakly translate into
"They have lived their life"), no doubt he felt that he and the republic
held theirs from that moment by a firmer tenure; no doubt very many of
those who heard him felt that they could breathe again, now that the
grasp of Catiline's assassins was, for the moment at all events, off