His leading fellow-conspirators were Cornelius Lentulus and Cethegus, who were then the city praetors. He procured much money from many women who hoped that they would get their husbands killed in the rising, and he formed a conspiracy with a number of senators and knights, and collected together a body of plebeians, foreign residents, and slaves. From this time Catiline abstained wholly from politics as not leading quickly and surely to absolute power, but as full of the spirit of contention and malice. Catiline, by way of raillery and contempt for those who voted for him, called him a "New Man, " on account of his obscure birth (for so they call those who achieve distinction by their own merits and not by those of their ancestors) and because he was not born in the city he called him "The Lodger," 2 by which term they designate those who occupy houses belonging to others. He confidently expected to be elected but the suspicion of his ulterior designs defeated him, and Cicero, the most eloquent orator and rhetorician of the period, was chosen instead. He had reduced himself to poverty in order to gratify his ambition, but still he was courted by the powerful, both men and women, and he became a candidate for the consulship as a step leading to absolute power. He had been a friend and zealous partisan of Sulla. P233 of his great celebrity, and high birth, but a madman, for it was believed that he had killed his own son because of his own love for Aurelia Orestilla, who was not willing to marry a man who had a son. While yet aedile and praetor he had incurred great debts and had made himself wonderfully agreeable to the multitude, who always sing the praises of those who are lavish in expenditure.Ģ 1 Gaius 1 Catiline was a person of note, by reason Caesar was still a young man, but powerful in speech and action, audacious in every way, sanguine in everything, and profuse beyond his means in the pursuit of honours. Pompey had lately cleared the sea of pirates, who were then more numerous than ever before, and afterwards had overthrown Mithridates, king of Pontus, and regulated his kingdom and the other nations that he had subdued in the East. How these things came about and how both Pompey and Caesar lost their lives, this second book of the Civil Wars will show. 1 1 After the sole rule of Sulla, and the operations, later on, of Sertorius and Perpenna in Spain, other internal commotions of a similar nature took place among the Romans until Gaius Caesar and Pompey the Great waged war against each other, and Caesar made an end of Pompey and was himself killed in the senate-chamber because he was accused of behaving after the fashion of royalty.
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