Crassus

However, when once they had assumed office,[*](70 B.C.) they did not remain on this friendly basis, but differed on almost every measure, quarrelled with one another about everything, and by their contentiousness rendered their consulship barren politically and without achievement, except that Crassus made a great sacrifice in honour of Hercules, feasted the people at ten thousand tables, and made them an allowance of grain for three months.

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.