"Whether should best know Marius, they who fought by his side, or they who slew his friends? Who should best know the great Gracchi if not Fulvius, the grandson of that Fulvius Flaccus, who died with them, in the forum, by the hands of Saturninus?"
"Vote for Catiline! vote for Catiline! friends of the people!" shouted the smith again, reëchoed by all his savage and vociferous gang, seeking to drown the voice of the true man of the people.
"Aye" exclaimed Fulvius, ironically, springing upon a stone horse-block, thence to address the people, who shouted "Flaccus! Flaccus!" on all sides. "Live Fulvius Flaccus! Speak to us, noble Fulvius!"
"Aye!" he exclaimed, "friends of the people, followers of Marius, vote, if ye be wise men, for the murderer of his kinsman—for Catiline, who slew Marius Gratidianus!"
"No! no! we will none of them! no Catiline! no follower of Sylla? To your tribes, men of Rome—to your tribes!"
The mingled cries waxed wild and terrible; and it was clear that the popular party was broken, by the bold words of the speaker, into two bodies, if ever it had been united. But little cared the conspirators for that, since they had counted, not upon winning by a majority of tribes, but by a civic massacre.
And now—even as that roar was the loudest, while Flaccus in vain strove to gain a hearing, for the third time the brazen trumpets of the centuries awoke their stirring symphonies, announcing that the hour had arrived for the tribes to commence their voting.
Those who were in the secret looked eagerly over the field. The hour had come—the leader was at their head—they waited but the signal!
That signal, named by Catiline, in the house of Læca,—the blood of Cicero!
They saw a mass of men, pressing on like a mighty wedge through the dense multitude; parting the waves of the living ocean as a stout galley parts the billows; struggling on steadily toward the knoll, whereon, amid the magnates of the land, consulars, senators, and knights, covering it with the pomp of white and crimson gowns, gemmed only by the flashing axe-heads of the lictors, stood the great Consul.
They saw the gladiators forming themselves into a separate band, on the slopes of the Janiculum, with a senator’s robe distinct among the dark gray tunics.