Cicero fled--gazing in cynical disgust at the panic and incompetence, yet with a sword of Damocles, as he believed, hanging over his head also.

"I fear that Caesar will be a very Phalaris, and that we may expect the very worst," he wrote to his intimate friend Atticus, who, safe from harm and turmoil, was dwelling under the calm Athenian sky.

A great fraction of the Senate departed; only those stayed who felt that their loyalty to the advancing Imperator was beyond dispute, or who deemed themselves too insignificant to fall beneath his displeasure.

In the hour of crisis the old ties of religion and superstition reasserted themselves.

Senators and magistrates, who had deemed it a polite avocation to mock at the gods and deny the existence of any absolute ethical standards, now, before they climbed into their carriages for flight, went, with due ritual, into the temples of the gods of their fathers, and swore hecatombs of milk-white Umbrian steers to Capitoline Jove, if the awful deity would restore them to the native land they then were quitting.