click to read pdf file - The Preterist Archive

A MASSACRE OF SLAVES 357
' '
We have but few, Petronius,' said Titus ;
but they love us.
When I was ill, all the familia were as tender in their attentions
as if they had been brothers.'
'
'
Like to like,' whispered Tigellinus. He is half of slaveorigin
himself.'
'And what may your origin be ?' asked Vestinus, to whom
the remark had been made, and who loathed Tigellinus.
The rumour had spread that all the slaves of Pedanius were
to be executed, and the attitude of the people grew very
threatening. Many of them had been slaves themselves,
and many of them lived in intimacy with the slave population,
which immensely outnumbered the freedmen. Familiar
with the insolence and the exactions of the wealthy, they
assembled in throngs and demanded that there should be
a trial, and that the innocent should be spared. Their language
became so menacing that the Senate was hastily convened.
It was hoped by
all the more just and kind of the
senators that mild counsels would prevail, and the Silanian
decree be repealed or modified. They pointed out that the
extreme rarity of the crime showed that the peril was not
great; that, in this particular instance, Pedanius, besides
being a merciless master, had provoked his own fate ;
that
there was not a tittle of evidence to prove the complicity of
the familia in this deed of isolated vengeance that it would
;
be monstrous to kill innocent boys and girls,
and faithful men
and women, for one madman's crime. But the Senate was
carried away partly by the selfish fears of many of its members,
and partly by the impassioned speech of Cassius Longinus.
An eminent jurist, a conservative who considered the
traditions of the past incomparably superior to the wisdom of
the present, a man of great wealth, high rank, and a certain
Eoman integrity, he rose in his place, and threw the weight
of his influence into the scale of the old pagan ruthlessness.
'
Often have I been present, Conscript Fathers,' he said,
'
at meetings of the Senate in which I have only protested
by my silence against the innovations which are almost
invariably for the worse. I did not wish you to think that
I was unduly biassed by my personal studies, nor did I
wish to weaken such weight as I may possess by too frequent
and fruitless interpositions. But to-day the commonwealth
demands my undivided efforts. A consular of