The remains of Catiline's army, after the death of their leader, continued to make efforts to raise another insurrection. In August, eight months after the battle, a party, under the command of Lucius Sergius, perhaps a relative or freedman of Catiline, still offered resistance to the forces of the government in Etruria. _Reliquiae conjuratorum, cum L. Sergio, tumultuantur in Hetruria_. Fragm. Act. Diurn. The responsibility of watching these marauders was left to the proconsul Metellus Celer. After some petty encounters, in which the insurgents were generally worsted, Sergius, having collected his force at the foot of the Alps, attempted to penetrate into the country of the Allobroges, expecting to find them ready to take up arms; but Metellus, learning his intention, pre-occupied the passes, and then surrounded and destroyed him and his followers. At Rome, in the mean time, great honors were paid to Cicero. A thanksgiving of thirty days was decreed in his name, an honor which had previously been granted to none but military men, and which was granted to him, to use his own words, because _he had delivered the city from fire, the citizens from slaughter, and Italy from war_. "If my thanksgiving," he also observes, "be compared with those of others, there will be found this difference, that theirs were granted them for having managed the interests of the republic successfully, but that mine was decreed to me for having preserved the republic from ruin." See Cic. Orat. iii., in Cat., c. 6. Pro Sylla, c. 30. In Pison. c. 3. Philipp. xiv., 8. Quintus Catulus, then _princeps senatus_, and Marcus Roma parentem, Roma patrem patriae Ciceronem libera dixit. Juv. Sat., viii. 244. Of the inferior conspirators, who did not follow Sergius, and who were apprehended at Rome, or in other parts of Italy, after the death of the leaders in the plot, some were put to death, chiefly on the testimony of Lucius Vettius, one of their number, who turned informer against the rest. But many whom he accused were acquitted; others, supposed to be guilty, were allowed to escape. THE JUGURTHINE WAR THE ARGUMENT.