Cicero

Sacrifice is offered to her annually in the house of the consul by his wife or his mother, in the presence of the Vestal Virgins. Cicero, then, having gone into his friend’s house, began to deliberate with himself—and he had only very few companions—what he should do with the men.[*](Cf Sallust’s Catiline, 46. ) For he shrank from inflicting the extreme penalty, and the one befitting such great crimes, and he hesitated to do it because of the kindliness of his nature, and at the same time that he might not appear to make an excessive use of his power and to trample ruthlessly upon men who were of the highest birth and had powerful friends in the city; and if he treated them with less severity, he was afraid of the peril into which they would bring the state.

For if they suffered any milder penalty than death, he was sure they would not be satisfied, but would break out into every extreme of boldness, having added fresh rage to their old villainy: and he himself would be thought unmanly and weak, especially as the multitude already thought him very far from courageous.

While Cicero was in this perplexity, a sign was given to the women who were sacrificing. The altar, it seems, although the fire was already thought to have gone out, sent forth from the ashes and burnt bark upon it a great bright blaze. The rest of the women were terrified at this, but the sacred virgins bade Terentia the wife of Cicero go with all speed to her husband and tell him to carry out his resolutions in behalf of the country, since the goddess was giving him a great light on this path to safety and glory.

So Terentia, who was generally of no mild spirit nor without natural courage, but an ambitious woman, and, as Cicero himself tells us[*](In some passage no longer extant.) more inclined to make herself a partner in his political perplexities than to share with him her domestic concerns, gave him this message and incited him against the conspirators; so likewise did Quintus, his brother, and Publius Nigidius, one of his philosophical companions, to whom he made the most and greatest use in his political undertakings.

On the following day the senate discussed the punishment of the conspirators, and Silanus, who was the first to be asked to give his opinion, said that they ought to be taken to prison and there suffer extremest punishment. All the senators acceded to his opinion one after the other, until it came to Caius Caesar,[*](Cf. Cicero, in Catil. iv. 4, 7. ) who afterwards became dictator. At this time, however, he was a young man still and at the very beginning of his rise to power, but in his public policy and his hopes he had already entered upon that road by which he changed the Roman state into a monarchy. His designs were still unnoticed by the rest,