Cossutianus made a beginning, and then Marcellus in more violent tones exclaimed that the whole commonwealth was at stake."It is,"he said, "the stubbornness of inferiors which lessens the clemency of our ruler.We senators have hitherto been too lenient in allowing him to be mocked with impunity by Thrasea throwing off allegiance, by his son-in-law Helvidius Priscus indulging similar frenzies, by Paconius Agrippinus, the inheritor of his father's hatred towards emperors, and by Curtius Montanus, the habitual composer of abominable verses.I miss the presence of an ex-consul in the Senate, of a priest when we offer our vows, of a citizen when we swear obedience, unless indeed, in defiance of the manners and rites of our ancestors, Thrasea has openly assumed the part of a traitor and an enemy.In a word, let the man, wont to act the senator and to screen those who disparage the prince, come among us; let him propose any reform or change he may desire.We shall more readily endure his censure of details than we can now bear the silence by which he condemns everything.Is it the peace throughout the world or victories won without loss to our armies which vex him? A man who grieves at the country's prosperity, who treats our public places, theatres and temples as if they were a desert, and who is ever threatening us with exile, let us not enable such an one to gratify his perverse vanity.To him the decrees of this house, the offices of State, the city of Rome seem as nothing.Let him sever his life from a country all love for which he has long lost and the very sight of which he has now put from him."While Marcellus, with the savage and menacing look he usually wore, spoke these and like words with rising fury in his voice, countenance, and eye, that familiar grief to which a thick succession of perils had habituated the Senate gave way to a new and profounder panic, as they saw the soldiers' hands on their weapons.At the same moment the venerable form of Thrasea rose before their imagination, and some there were who pitied Helvidius too, doomed as he was to suffer for an innocent alliance."What again," they asked, "was the charge against Agrippinus except his father's sad fate, since he too, though guiltless as his son, fell beneath the cruelty of Tiberius? As for Montanus, a youth without a blemish, author of no libellous poem, he was positively driven out an exile because he had exhibited genius."And meanwhile Ostorius Sabinus, the accuser of Soranus, entered, and began by speaking of his friendship with Rubellius Plautus and of his proconsulate in Asia which he had, he said, adapted to his own glory rather than to the public welfare, by fostering seditious movements in the various states.These were bygones, but there was a fresh charge involving the daughter in the peril of the father, to the effect that she had lavished money on astrologers.This indeed had really occurred through the filial affection of Servilia (that was the girl's name), who, out of love for her father and the thoughtlessness of youth, had consulted them, only however about the safety of her family, whether Nero could be appeased, and the trial before the Senate have no dreadful result.
She was accordingly summoned before the Senate, and there they stood facing one another before the consuls' tribunal, the aged parent, and opposite to him the daughter, in the twentieth year of her age, widowed and forlorn, her husband Annius Pollio having lately been driven into banishment, without so much as a glance at her father, whose peril she seemed to have aggravated.
