1But still, Servius, what an axe do you think you struck into your own candidacy when you brought the Roman people into such fear that they dreaded Catiline becoming consul, while you were preparing a prosecution and had laid aside and thrown away your candidacy? 49For they saw you investigating, gloomy yourself, your friends downcast; 49they noticed the watching, the taking of depositions, the drawing aside of witnesses, the withdrawals with your co-prosecutors, things by which candidates' very faces certainly tend to look gloomier; 49they saw Catiline meanwhile eager and cheerful, surrounded by a troop of young men, fenced about by informers and assassins, puffed up with hope both in the soldiers and in the promises of my colleague, as he himself used to say, with an army of colonists from Arretium and Faesulae flowing round him; 49a crowd set off by men of a very different kind, men struck down by the disaster of Sulla's time.
49His face was full of frenzy, his eyes of wickedness, his speech of arrogance, so that the consulship seemed to him already assured and stored away at home. 49He despised Murena; Sulpicius he counted as his accuser, not his rival; 49he threatened him with violence, he menaced the state.