Crassus

And when at last their term of office was closing, and they were addressing the assembly, a certain man, not a noble, but a Roman knight, rustic and rude in his way of life, Onatius Aurelius, mounted the rostra and recounted to the audience a vision that had come to him in his sleep. Jupiter, he said, appeared to me and bade me declare in public that you should not suffer your consuls to lay down their office until they become friends.

When the man said this and the people urged a reconciliation, Pompey, for his part, stood motionless, but Crassus took the initiative, clasped him by the hand, and said: Fellow-citizens, I think there is nothing humiliating or unworthy in my taking the first step towards good-will and friendship with Pompey, to whom you gave the title of Great before he had grown a beard, and voted him a triumph before he was a senator.

Such, then, were the memorable things in the consulship of Crassus, but his censorship[*](65 B.C.) passed without any results or achievements whatever. He neither made a revision of the senate, nor a scrutiny of the knights, nor a census of the people, although he had Lutatius Catulus, the gentlest of the Romans, for his colleague. But they say that when Crassus embarked upon the dangerous and violent policy of making Egypt tributary to Rome, Catulus opposed him vigorously, whereupon, being at variance, both voluntarily laid down their office.

In the affair of Catiline,[*](63-62 B.C.) which was very serious, and almost subversive of Rome, some suspicion attached itself to Crassus, and a man publicly named him as one of the conspirators, but nobody believed him.

Nevertheless, Cicero, in one of his orations,[*](Not extant.) plainly inculpated Crassus and Caesar. This oration, it is true, was not published until after both were dead; but in the treatise upon his consulship,[*](Not extant.) Cicero says that Crassus came to him by night with a letter which gave details of the affair of Catiline,[*](Cf. Plutarch’s Cicero, xv. ) and felt that he was at last establishing the fact of a conspiracy.

And Crassus, accordingly, always hated Cicero for this, but was kept from doing him any open injury by his son. For Publius Crassus, being given to literature and learning, was attached to Cicero, so much so that he put on mourning when Cicero did at the time of his trial, and prevailed upon the other young men to do the same. And finally he persuaded his father to become Cicero’s friend.