"You politicians are blind," retorted Flaccus.
The debate raged on. But by law the Senate could not convene on the third and fourth of the month, and the question of setting aside the tribunician veto went over until the fifth. It was the last lull before the outbreak of the great tempest. The little group of Cæsarians put forth their final efforts. Drusus went in person to call on Cicero, the great orator, and plead with him to come out from his residence in the suburbs and argue for peace. The destroyer of Catilina had declared that he would not forfeit his rights to a triumph for his Cilician victories by appearing prematurely in the Senate. Besides, he could never antagonize Pompeius. Curio smiled grimly when his colleague reported his fruitless embassy.
"I think, my friends," said the politician, "we shall soon prove the old saying, 'Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.'"
CHAPTER XV
THE SEVENTH OF JANUARY
I
The rapid march of events that week had taken Drusus out of himself, and made him forgetful of personal consequences; but it sobered him when he heard Curio and Cælius, his associates, telling Balbus where their wills would be found deposited if anything calamitous were to befall them. After all, life was very sweet to the young Livian. He could not at heart desire to drift off into nothingness—to stop breathing, thinking, feeling. And for the last time he reviewed his position; told himself that it was not an unworthy cause for which he was contending; that it was not treason, but patriotism, to wish to overthrow the great oligarchy of noble families, who by their federated influence had pulled the wires to every electoral assembly, so that hardly a man not of their own coterie had been elected to high office for many a long year; while the officials themselves had grown full and wanton on the revenues wrung from the score of unfortunate provinces.
The feeling against the Cæsarians was very bitter in the city. Cæsar had always been the friend and darling of the populace; but, now that his star seemed setting, hardly a voice was raised, save to cry up the patriotism and determination of the consuls and Pompeius Magnus. Soldiers of the latter's legions were everywhere. The Senate was to convene the afternoon of the seventh, in the Curia of Pompeius, in the Campus Martius. Lentulus Crus was dragging forth every obscure senator, every retired politician, whose feet almost touched the grave, to swell his majority. All knew that the tribunes' vetoes were to be set aside, and arbitrary power decreed to the consuls. Drusus began to realize that the personal peril was pressing.
"Won't his head look pretty for the crows to pick at?" commented Marcus Læca to a friend, as the two swept past Drusus on the street. The Livian heard the loudly muttered words and trembled. It was easy to laud the Decii who calmly sacrificed their lives for the Republic, and many another martyr to patriotism; it was quite another thing to feel the mortal fear of death coursing in one's veins, to reflect that soon perhaps the dogs might be tearing this body which guarded that strange thing one calls self; to reflect that all which soon will be left of one is a bleaching skull, fixed high in some public place, at which the heartless mob would point and gibber, saying, "That is the head of Quintus Livius Drusus, the rebel!"