Antonius shook his head, and remarked:—­

“You ought not to go with me.  Little enough can we who are tribunes do; you have neither voice nor vote, and Lentulus is your personal foe.  So back, before it is too late.  Let us shift for ourselves.”

Drusus replied never a word, but simply took the tribune’s arm and walked the faster toward the Curia.

“I am a very young soldier,” he said presently; “do not be angry if I wish to show that I am not afraid of the whizzing arrows.”

“Then, my friend, whatever befalls, so long as life is in my body, remember you have a brother in Marcus Antonius.”

The two friends pressed one another’s hands, and entered the Curia Pompeii.  There in one of the foremost seats sat the Magnus,[145] the centre of a great flock of adulators, who were basking in the sunshine of his favour.  Yet Drusus, as he glanced over at the Imperator, thought that the great man looked harassed and worried—­forced to be partner in a scheme when he would cheerfully be absent.  Fluttering in their broad togas about the senate-house were Domitius, Cato, the Marcelli, and Scipio, busy whipping into line the few remaining waverers.  As Cato passed the tribune’s bench, and saw the handful of Caesarians gathered there, he cast a glance of indescribable malignity upon them, a glance that made Drusus shudder, and think again of the horrors of the Tullianum.

[145] Pompeius was not allowed by law to attend sessions of the Senate (so long as he was proconsul of Spain) when held inside the old city limits; but the Curia which he himself built was outside the walls in the Campus Martius.  This meeting seems to have been convened there especially that he might attend it.

“I know now how Cato looked,” said he to Antonius, “when he denounced the Catilinarians and urged that they should be put to death without trial.”

Antonius shrugged his shoulders, and replied:—­

“Cato cannot forgive Caesar.  When Caesar was consul, Cato interrupted his speech, and Caesar had him haled off to prison.  Marcus Cato never forgives or forgets.”

Curio, Caelius, and Quintus Cassius had entered the senate-house—­the only Caesarians present besides Antonius and his viator.  The first two went and took their seats in the body of the building, and Drusus noticed how their colleagues shrank away from them, refusing to sit near the supporters of the Gallic proconsul.

“Eho!” remarked Antonius, his spirits rising as the crisis drew on.  “This is much like Catilina’s days, to be sure!  No one would sit with him when he went into the Senate.  However, I imagine that these excellent gentlemen will hardly find Caesar as easy to handle as Catilina.”

Again Lentulus was in his curule chair, and again the solemn farce of taking the auspices, preparatory to commencing the session, was gone through.

Then for the last time in that memorable series of debates Lentulus arose and addressed the Senate, storming, browbeating, threatening, and finally ending with these words, that brought everything to a head:—­