ed like automata the self-confident
Greek who went everywhere as if he were in his own house, and who spoke
many languages as if the entire world were his country.

The senators began to arrive. Some came from their business in the city
and presented themselves garbed in the white toga with purple border,
followed by their clients who turned their gaze in all directions as if
to attract public attention to their majestic protector. Others came
from the country, drawing up their carts before the steps of the
Senaculum, and, handing the reins to a slave, ascended to the temple
with their togas flung over their arms, dressed in the short cloak of
coarse wool worn by farmers, and emitting the odors of their stables and
crops. They were mature men who displayed in the firmness of their
strong muscles the activity of their life of continued struggle with the
soil and with enemies; old men with long beards and wizened faces,
tremulous with age, who still revealed in their unflinching eyes
reliance on their departing strength. The crowd from the Forum, surging
toward the steps of the Senaculum, watched them with admiration and
respect. They were the fathers of the Republic, the heads of Rome.

The two legates from Saguntum walked up the temple steps. Under the
columns which sustained the pediment were numberless piles of loot from
the last wars, deposited by the conquerors as they paraded through the
Forum before the multitude, which had hailed them, waving branches of
laurel. Actaeon saw shields pierced by iron swords, rusted by blood;
war-chariots with broken tongues, the gilded wheels bespattered with the
mud of battles. They were spoils from the war with the Samnites. Farther
on, standing along the wall, a row of hideous wooden dwarfs, dyed red
and blue, stripped from the prows of Carthaginian ships after the great
victory at the AEgates Islands; iron bars which had closed the gates of
many cities conquered by the Romans; the golden standards decorated with
fantastic animals which led the troops of Pyrrhus; the enormous tusks of
the elephants which this descendent of Achilles had marched against the
legions of Rome; the horned or eagle-winged helmet of the Ligurians; the
darts of Alpine tribes, and, beside the door, as a trophy of honor, the
armor of the glorious Camillus, paraded in triumph by the city after
this great Roman had driven the Gauls from the Capitol. Along the walls,
as a strange decoration, hung a long dark t