POMPEY'S TRIUMPH.--After regulating the affairs of the different states and provinces in the East, Pompey set out on his return to Rome, where he enjoyed such a triumph as never before had been seen since Rome had become a city. The spoils of all the East were borne in the procession; 322 princes walked as captives before the triumphal chariot of the conqueror; legends upon the banners proclaimed that he had conquered 21 kings, captured 1000 strongholds, 900 towns, and 800 ships, and subjugated more than 12,000,000 people; and that he had put into the treasury more than $25,000,000, besides doubling the regular revenues of the state. He boasted that three times he had triumphed, and each time for the conquest of a continent--first for Africa, then for Europe, and now for Asia, which completed the conquest of the world.
THE CONSPIRACY OF CATILINE.--While the legions were absent from Italy with Pompey in the East, a most daring conspiracy against the government was formed at Rome. Catiline, a ruined spendthrift, had gathered a large company of profligate young nobles, weighed down with debt and desperate like himself, and had deliberately planned to murder the consuls and the chief men of the state, and to plunder and burn the capital. The offices of the new government were to be divided among the conspirators. They depended upon receiving aid from Africa and Spain, and proposed to invite to their standard the gladiators in the various schools of Italy, as well as slaves and criminals. The proscriptions of Sulla were to be renewed, and all debts were to be cancelled.
Fortunately, all the plans of the conspirators were revealed to the consul Cicero, the great orator. The Senate immediately clothed the consuls with dictatorial power with the usual formula, that they should take care that the republic received no harm. The gladiators were secured; the city walls were manned; and at every point the capital and state were armed against the "invisible foe." Then in the Senate-chamber, with Catiline himself present, Cicero exposed the whole conspiracy in a famous philippic, known as "The First Oration against Catiline." The senators shrank from the conspirator, and left the seats about him empty. After a feeble effort to reply to Cicero, overwhelmed by a sense of his guilt, and the cries of "traitor" and "parricide" from the senators, Catiline fled from the chamber, and hurried out of the city to the camp of his followers, in Etruria. In a desperate battle fought near Pistoria (62 B.C.), he was slain with many of his followers. His head was borne as a trophy to Rome. Cicero was hailed as the "Saviour of his Country."