7.
[16]
Now, since, O citizens you have the nefarious leaders of this most wicked and dangerous war
taken prisoners and in your grasp, you ought to think that all the resources of
Catiline,—all his hopes and all his power, now that these dangers of the city are
warded off, have fallen to pieces. And, indeed, when I drove him from the city I foresaw in
my mind, O citizens, that if Catiline were removed, I had no cause to fear either the
drowsiness of Publius Lentulus, or the fat of Lucius Cassius, or the mad rashness of Cassius
Cethegus. He alone was to be feared of all these men, and that, only as long as he was within
the walls of the city. He knew everything, he had access to everybody. He had the skill and
the audacity to address, to tempt and to tamper with every one. He had acuteness suited to
crime; and neither tongue nor hand ever failed to support that acuteness. Already he had men
he could rely on chosen and distributed for the execution of all other business and when he
had ordered anything to be done he did not think it was done on that account. There was
nothing to which he did not personally attend and see to,—for which he did not
watch and toil. He was able to endure cold, thirst, and hunger.
[17]
Unless I had driven this man, so active, so ready, so audacious, so crafty, so vigilant in
wickedness, so industrious in criminal exploits, from his plots within the city to the open
warfare of the camp, (I will express my honest opinion, O citizens,) I should not easily have
removed from your necks so vast a weight of evil. He would not have determined on the
Saturnalia 1 to massacre you he would
not have announced the destruction of the republic, and even the day of its
doom so long beforehand,—he would never have allowed his seal and his letters, the
undeniable witnesses of his guilt, to be taken, which now, since he is absent, has been so
done that no larceny in a private house has ever been so thoroughly and clearly detected as
this vast conspiracy against the republic. But if Catiline had remained in the city to this
day, although, as long as he was so, I met all his designs and withstood them; yet, to say
the least, we should have had to fight with him, and should never, while he remained as an
enemy in the city, have delivered the republic from such dangers, with such ease, such
tranquillity, and such silence.
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1 The Saturnalia was a feast of Saturn at which extraordinary licence and indulgence was allowed to all the slaves; it took place at the end of December, while this speech of Cicero was delivered early in November.
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