in this respect.  For his house at Formiae they gave him half as much.  We hear of his rebuilding the house.  He had advertised the contract, he tells us in the same letter in which he complains of the insufficient compensation.  Some of his valuables he recovered, but we hear no more of collecting.  He had lost heart for it, as men will when such a disaster has happened to them.  He was growing older too, and the times were growing more and more troublous.  Possibly money was not so plentiful with him as it had been in earlier days.  But we have one noble monument of the man connected with the second of his two Tusculum houses.  He makes it the scene of the “Discussions of Tusculum,” one of the last of the treatises in the writing of which he found consolation for private and public sorrows.  He describes himself as resorting in the afternoon to his “Academy,” and there discussing how the wise man may rise superior to the fear of death, to pain and to sorrow, how he may rule his passions, and find contentment in virtue alone.  “If it seems,” he says, summing up the first of these discussions, “if it seems the clear bidding of God that we should quit this life [he seems to be speaking of suicide, which appeared to a Roman to be, under certain circumstances, a laudable act], let us obey gladly and thankfully.  Let us consider that we are being loosed from prison, and released from chains, that we may either find our way back to a home that is at once everlasting and manifestly our own, or at least be quit forever of all sensation and trouble.  If no such bidding come to us, let us at least cherish such a temper that we may look on that day so dreadful to others as full of blessing to us; and let us look on nothing that is ordered for us either by the everlasting gods or by nature, our common mother, as an evil.  It is not by some random chance that we have been created.  There is beyond all doubt some mighty Power which watches over the race of man, which does not produce a creature whose doom it is, after having exhausted all other woes, to fall at last into the unending woe of death.  Rather let us believe that we have in death a haven and refuge prepared for us.  I would that we might sail thither with widespread sails; if not, if contrary winds shall blow us back, still we must needs reach, though it may be somewhat late, the haven where we would be.  And as for the fate which is the fate of all, how can it be the unhappiness of one?”

CHAPTER VII.

A GREAT CONSPIRACY.

Sergius Catiline belonged to an ancient family which had fallen into poverty.  In the evil days of Sulla, when the nobles recovered the power which they had lost, and plundered and murdered their adversaries, he had shown himself as cruel and as wicked as any of his fellows.  Like many others he had satisfied grudges of his own under pretense of serving his party, and had actually killed his brother-in-law with his