Where a band gathers, leaders are not wanting; and in this case the men were soon found who were fitted to be captains of banditti.
Catalina The late praetor Lucius Catilina, and the quaestor Gnaeus Piso, were distinguished among their fellows not merely by their genteel birth and their superior rank.

They had broken down the bridge completely behind them, and impressed their accomplices by their dissoluteness quite as much as by their talents.

Catilina especially was one of the most wicked men in that wicked age.

His villanies belong to the records of crime, not to history; but his very outward appearance--the pale countenance, the wild glance, the gait by turns sluggish and hurried--betrayed his dismal past.

He possessed in a high degree the qualities which are required in the leader of such a band-- the faculty of enjoying all pleasures and of bearing all privations, courage, military talent, knowledge of men, the energy of a felon, and that horrible mastery of vice, which knows how to bring the weak to fall and how to train the fallen to crime.
To form out of such elements a conspiracy for the overthrow of the existing order of things could not be difficult to men who possessed money and political influence.