han gather a few valuables together: property,
children, wives--all these were left to the avenger. Down the Via
Appia, toward Campania, where was their only safety, poured the
panic-stricken company. Every carriage, every horse, was in service.
The hard-driven chariots of the consuls were the tokens merely of the
swiftest flight. Lentulus Crus fled; Caius Marcellus, his colleague,
was close behind; Domitius fled, with his sons; Cato fled, ironically
exclaiming that they would have to leave everything to Pompeius now,
"for those who can raise up great evils can best allay them." Favonius
fled, whose first words, when he met the Magnus, were to command him
to "stamp on the ground for the legions so sorely needed." Piso,
Scipio, and many another fled--their guilty hearts adding wings to
their goings. 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. And as they
went down from the temples and hastened toward the gates, friends and
clients who could not join their flight crowded after them, sighing,
lamenting, and moaning. Out over the Campagna they streamed, this
company of senators, praetors, consuls--men who had voted thrones to
kings, and decreed the deposition of monarchs; whose personal wealth
was princely, whose lineage the noblest in the world, whose ancestors
had beaten down Etruscan, Gaul, Samnite, and Carthaginian, that their
posterity might enjoy the glory of unequalled empire. And these
descendants fled, fled not before