Late on the evening of the 5th of December the prisoners were brought from their previous quarters, and conducted across the market-place still densely crowded by men to the prison in which criminals condemned to death were wont to be kept.
It was a subterranean vault, twelve feet deep, at the foot of the Capitol, which formerly had served as a well-house.
The consul himself conducted Lentulus, and praetors the others, all attended by strong guards; but the attempt at rescue, which had been expected, did not take place.

No one knew whether the prisoners were being conveyed to a secure place of custody or to the scene of execution.

At the door of the prison they were handed over to the -tresviri- who conducted the executions, and were strangled in the subterranean vault by torchlight.

The consul had waited before the door till the executions were accomplished, and then with his loud well-known voice proclaimed over the Forum to the multitude waiting in silence, "They are dead." Till far on in the night the crowds moved through the streets and exultingly saluted the consul, to whom they believed that they owed the security of their houses and their property.

The senate ordered public festivals of gratitude, and the first men of the nobility, Marcus Cato and Quintus Catulus, saluted the author of the sentence of death with the name--now heard for the first time--of a "father of his fatherland." But it was a dreadful deed, and all the more dreadful that it appeared to a whole people great and praiseworthy.