after the senate moved again to pass legislation to stamp it out, Cicero and Antonius as consuls were successful in moving the lex Tullia increasing penalties and enumerating forbidden electoral practices. Just before the elections, Cicero alleges Catiline engaged in demagoguery and attempted to build up his bona fides with the poor and dispossessed men of Rome and Italy, including himself among their number, advocating the wholescale abolition of all existing debts (). At the electoral comitia, Cicero presided, surrounded by a bodyguard and wearing an ostentatious cuirass to signal his belief that Catiline posed a threat to his person and public safety. Sallust reports that Catiline promised his supporters that he would kill the rich but this supposed promise is likely ahistorical. No contemporary source indicates that Catiline supported land reform. The comitia returned as consuls-designate Decimus Junius Silanus and Lucius Licinius Murena. After his second defeat, Catiline seems to have run out of money and must have been abandoned by his former supporters such as Crassus and Caesar. Conspiracy On 18 or 19 October, Crassus and two other senators visited Cicero's house on the Oppian Hill (near the ruins of the Colosseum) and delivered to the consuls anonymous letters warning that Catiline was planning a massacre of leading politicians and advising them to leave the city. Cicero convened the senate and had them read aloud. A few days later, on the 21st or 22nd, an ex-praetor reported news that an ex-Sullan centurion – Gaius Manlius – who had supported Catiline's bid for the consulship had raised an army in Etruria. The senate acted immediately, usually dated to the 21st, to pass a senatus consultum ultimum directing the consuls to take whatever actions they believed necessary for state security. When news of the decree arrived to Manlius, he declared an open rebellion. Some modern scholars reject a connection between Manlius and Catiline at this early point, arguing that Manlius' rebellion may have been separate from Catiline's alleged conspiracy and that the conspiracy only came into actual fruition when Catiline joined Manlius' rebellion when leaving Rome for exile and seeing nothing to lose. There are, however, no indications of this in the ancient sources. Catiline's indebtedness – if he was in fact indebted, there is little evidence one way or the other, – was not the sole cause of his conspiring: "wounded pride and fierce ambition" played a great role