In certain emergencies the Senate would call upon the Consuls to see that the Republic should suffer no injury, and it had been held that at such moments the Consuls were invested with an authority above all law.
Cicero had been thus strengthened when, as Consul, he had struggled with Catiline; but it was an open question, as Cicero himself very well knew.
In the year of his Consulship--the very year in which Lentulus and the others had been strangled--he had defended Rabirius, who was then accused of having killed a citizen thirty years before.

Rabirius was charged with having slaughtered the Tribune Saturninus by consular authority, the Consuls of the day having been ordered to defend the Republic, as Cicero had been ordered.

Rabirius probably had not killed Saturninus, nor did any one now care whether he had done so or not.

The trial had been brought about notoriously by the agency of Caesar, who caused himself to be selected by the Praetor as one of the two judges for the occasion;[274] and Caesar's object as notoriously was to lessen the authority of the Senate, and to support the democratic interest.

Both Cicero and Hortensius defended Rabirius, but he was condemned by Caesar, and, as we are told, himself only escaped by using that appeal to the people in support of which he had himself been brought to trial.