But of the method in which this Triumvirate was constructed, who has an idea?
How was it first suggested, where, and by whom?
What was it that the conspirators combined to do?
There was no purpose of wholesale murder like that of Catiline for destroying the Senate, and of Guy Faux for blowing up the House of Lords.

There was no plot arranged for silencing a body of legislators like that of Napoleon.

In these scrambles that are going on every year for place and power, for provinces and plunder, let us help each other.

If we can manage to stick fast by each other, we can get all the power and nearly all the plunder.
That, said with a wink by one of the Triumvirate--Caesar, let us say--and assented to with a nod by Pompey and Crassus, was sufficient for the construction of such a conspiracy as that which I presume to have been hatched when the First Triumvirate was formed.[231] Mommsen, who never speaks of a Triumvirate under that name, except in his index,[232] where he has permitted the word to appear for the guidance of persons less well instructed than himself, connects the transaction which we call the First Triumvirate with a former coalition, which he describes as having been made in (B.C.

71) the year before the Consulship of Pompey and Crassus.