The conflict lasted long, and many brave men fell on both sides; Catilina, who before the beginning of the battle had sent back his horse and those of all his officers, showed on this day that nature had destined him for no ordinary things, and that he knew at once how to command as a general and how to fight as a soldier. At length Petreius with his guard broke the centre of the enemy, and, after having overthrown this, attacked the two wings from within. This decided the victory. The corpses of the Catilinarians - there were counted 3000 of them - covered, as it were in rank and file, the ground where they had fought; the officers and the general himself had, when all was lost, thrown themselves headlong on the enemy and thus sought and found death (beginning of 692). Antonius was on account of this victory stamped by the senate with the title of Imperator, and new thanksgiving-festivals showed that the government and the governed were beginning to become accustomed to civil war.

The anarchist plot had thus been suppressed in the capital as in Italy with bloody violence; people were still reminded of it merely by the criminal processes which in the Etruscan country towns and in the capital thinned the ranks of those affiliated to the beaten party, and by the large accessions to the robber-bands of Italy - one of which, for instance, formed out of the remains of the armies of Spartacus and Catilina, was destroyed by a military force in 694 in the territory of Thurii. But it is important to keep in view that the blow fell by no means merely on the anarchists proper, who had conspired to set the capital on fire and had fought at Pistoria, but on the whole democratic party. That this party, and in particular Crassus and Caesar, had a hand in the game on the present occasion as well as in the plot of 688, may be regarded - not in a juristic, but in a historical, point of view - as an ascertained fact. The circumstance, indeed, that Catulus and the other heads of the senatorial party accused the leader of the democrats of complicity in the anarchist plot, and that the latter as senator spoke and voted against the brutal judicial murder contemplated by the oligarchy, could only be urged by partisan sophistry as any valid proof of his participation in the plans of Catilina. But a series of other facts is of more weight.

According to express and irrefragable testimonies it was especially Crassus and Caesar that supported the candidature of Catilina for the consulship. When Caesar in 690 brought the executioners of Sulla before the commission for murder[20] he allowed the rest to be condemned, but the most guilty and infamous of all, Catilina, to be acquitted. In the revelations of the 3rd of December, it is true, Cicero did not include among the names of the conspirators of whom he had information those of the two influential men; but it is notorious that the informers denounced not merely those against whom subsequently investigation was directed, but "many innocent" persons besides, whom the consul Cicero thought proper to erase from the list; and in later years, when he had no reason to disguise the truth, he expressly named Caesar among the accomplices. An indirect but very intelligible inculpation is implied also in the circumstance, that of the four persons arrested on the 3rd of December the two least dangerous, Statilius and Gabinius, were handed over to be guarded by the senators Caesar and Crassus; it was manifestly intended that these should either, if they allowed them to escape, be compromised in the view of public opinion as accessories, or, if they really detained them, be compromised in the view of their fellow-conspirators as renegades.

The following scene which occurred in the senate shows significantlyhow matters stood. Immediately after the arrest of Lentulus and his comrades, a messenger despatched by the conspirators in the capital to Catilina was seized by the agents of the government, and, after having been assured of impunity, was induced to make a comprehensive confession in a full meeting of the senate.

But when he came to the critical portions of his confession and in particular named Crassus as having commissioned him, he was interrupted by the senators, and on the suggestion of Cicero it was resolved to cancel the whole statement without farther inquiry, but to imprison its author notwithstanding the amnesty assured to him, until such time as he should have not merely retracted the statement, but should have also confessed who had instigated him to give such false testimony! Here it is abundantly clear, not merely that that man had a very accurate knowledge of the state of matters who, when summoned to make an attack upon Crassus, replied that he had no desire to provoke the bull of the herd, but also that the majority of the senate with Cicero at their head were agreed in not permitting the revelations to go beyond a certain limit. The public was not so nice; the young men, who had taken up arms to ward off the incendiaries, were exasperated against no one so much as against Caesar, on the 5th of December, when he left the senate, they pointed their swords at his breast and even now he narrowly escaped with his life on the same spot where the fatal blow fell on him seventeen years afterwards; he did not again for a considerable time enter the senate-house.

Any one who impartially considers the course of the conspiracy will not be able to resist the suspicion that during all this time Catilina was backed by more powerful men, who - relying on the want of a legally complete chain of evidence and on the lukewarmness and cowardice of the majority of the senate, which was but half-initiated and greedily caught at any pretext for inaction - knew how to hinder any serious interference with the conspiracy on the part of the authorities, to procure free departure for the chief of the insurgents, and even so to manage the declaration of war and the sending of troops against the insurrection that it was almost equivalent to the sending of an auxiliary army. While the course of the events themselves thus testifies that the threads of the Catilinarian plot reached far higher than Lentulus and Catilina, it deserves also to be noticed, that at a much later period, when Caesar had got to the head of the state, he was in the closest alliance with the only Catilinarian still surviving, Publius Sittius the leader of the Mauretanian free bands, and that he modified the law of debt quite in the sense that the proclamations of Manlius demanded.

All these pieces of evidence speak clearly enough; but, even were it not so, the desperate position of the democracy in presence of the military power - which since the Gabinio-Manilian laws assumed by its side an attitude more threatening than ever - renders it almost a certainty that, as usually happens in such cases, it sought a last resource in secret plots and in alliance with anarchy. The circumstances were very similar to those of the Cinnan times. While in the east Pompeius occupied a position nearly such as Sulla then did, Crassus and Caesar sought to raise over against him a power in Italy like that which Marius and Cinna had possessed, with the view of employing it if possible better than they had done. The way to this result lay once more through terrorism and anarchy, and to pave that way Catilina was certainly the fitting man. Naturally the more reputable leaders of the democracy kept themselves as far as possible in the background, and left to their unclean associates the execution of the unclean work, the political results of which they hoped afterwards to appropriate. Still more naturally, when the enterprise had failed, the partners of higher position applied every effort to conceal their participation in it. And at a later period, when the former conspirator had himself become the target of political plots, the veil was for that very reason drawn only the more closely over those darker years in the life of the great man, and even special apologies for him were written with that very object[21].