[149] Adjutant, subordinate to a centurion.

“Sirs,” announced the head lictor, “I am commanded by the consul, Lucius Lentulus Crus, to put you all under arrest for treason against the Republic.  Spare yourselves the indignity of personal violence, by offering no resistance.”

To resist would indeed have been suicide.  The friends had worn their short swords under their cloaks, but counting Agias they were only six, and the lictors were twelve, to say nothing of the soldiers, of whom there were thirty or more.

The ground seemed swaying before Drusus’s eyes; in his ears was a buzzing; his thoughts came to him, thick, confused, yet through them all ran the vision of Cornelia, and the conviction that he was never to see her again.  He looked back.  The soldiers at the head of the bridge had taken alarm and were marching down to complete the arrest.  He looked before.  The lictors, the troops, the stupid cattle and their stolid drivers, and the great black-sided warehouses, casting their gloomy shadow over the rippling river.  Down stream; not a skiff seemed stirring.  The water was plashing, dancing, glancing in the sunshine.  Below the wooden bridge the spars of a huge merchantman were just covering with canvas, as she stood away from her quay.  Up stream (the views were all compressed into the veriest moment)—­with the current came working, or rather drifting, a heavy barge loaded with timber.  Only two men, handling rude paddles, stood upon her deck.  The barge was about to pass under the very arch upon which stood the handful of entrapped Caesarians.  A word, a motion, and the last hope of escape would have been comprehended by the enemy, and all would have been lost.  But in moments of extreme peril it is easy to make a glance full of pregnancy.  Antonius saw the face of his friend—­saw and understood; and the other seemingly doomed men understood likewise.  In an instant the barge would pass under the bridge!

“Fellow,” replied Antonius (the whole inspection of the situation, formation of the plot, and visual dialogue had really been so rapid as to make no long break after the lictor ceased speaking), “do you dare thus to do what even the most profane and impious have never dared before?  Will you lay hands on two inviolate tribunes of the plebs, and those under their personal protection; and by your very act become a sacer—­an outlaw devoted to the gods, whom it is a pious thing for any man to slay?”

“I have my orders, sir,” replied the head lictor, menacingly.  “And I would have you know that neither you nor Quintus Cassius are reckoned tribunes longer by the Senate; so by no such plea can you escape arrest.”

“Tribunes no longer!” cried Antonius; “has tyranny progressed so far that no magistrate can hold office after he ceases to humour the consuls?”

“We waste time, sir,” said the lictor, sternly.  “Forward, men; seize and bind them!”