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 Laeca 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!" Drusus wandered on--on to the only place in Rome where he could gain the moral courage to carry him undaunted through that which was before him--to the Atrium of Vesta.