Chap. 45.] TEX FORTUNATE CIRCUMSTANCES, ETC. 193 



dition to the very considerable honours which he obtained, and 

 the surname which he acquired from the conquest of Macedonia, 

 he was carried to the funeral pile by his four sons, 93 one of 

 whom had been praetor, three of them consuls, two had ob- 

 tained triumphs, and one had been censor ; each of which 

 honours falls to the lot of a very few only. And yet, in the 

 very full-blown pride of his dignity, as he was returning from 

 the Campus Martius at mid-day, when the Forum and the Ca- 

 pitol are deserted, he was seized by the tribune, Caius Atinius 

 Labeo, 94 surnamed Macerion, whom, during his censorship, he 

 had ejected from the senate, and was dragged by him to the 

 Tarpeian rock, for the purpose of being precipitated therefrom. 

 The numerous band, however, who called him by the name of 

 father, flew to his assistance, though tardily, and only just, as it 

 were, at the very last moment, to attend his funeral obse- 

 quies, seeing that he could not lawfully offer resistance, or repel 

 force by force in the sacred case of a tribune; 95 and he was just 

 on the very point of perishing, the victim of his virtues and 

 the strictness of his censorship, when he was saved by the in- 

 tervention of another tribune, only obtained with the great- 

 est difficulty, and so rescued from the very jaws of death. 

 He afterwards had to subsist on the bounty of others, his pro- 

 perty having been consecrated 96 by the very man whom he had 



93 Val. Maxiraus, ubi supra, and Yelleius Paterculus, B. i. c. 11, speak of 

 the honours obtained by the four sons of Q. Metellus ; they are also 

 alluded to by Cicero in his 8th Philippic, sec. 4., and his Tusc. Quaest. B. i. 

 c. 35. B. 



94 Dalechamps remarks, that we find in the ancient historians a similar 

 account relative to M. Drusus, who, when tribune of the people, hurried 

 off the consul Philippus with such violence to prison, that the blood started 

 from his nostrils : also of P. Sempronius, the tribune of the people, who, 

 had it not been for the opposition offered by his colleague, would have 

 carried the censor Appius Claudius to prison. 



95 This attack of Labeo on Metellus is mentioned in the Epitome of Livy, 

 B. lix. The tribunes of Rome were styled '* sacrosancti," and it was con- 

 sidered a capital crime to offer personal violence to them, under any cir- 

 cumstances. Hardouin remarks, that the tribune who came to the rescue 

 of Metellus must have been a military tribune, who, in virtue of his office, 

 had a right to claim the services of Metellus for the army. B. 



96 Cicero, in his oration " Pro Dorno sua," sec. 47, refers to the conse- 

 cration of the property of Metellus, as a case analogous to that of his own 

 house, which had been similarly consecrated by Clodius. B. It seems to 

 have been the custom, when a person had been capitally condemned, for 

 the tribune of the people to consecrate his property, with certain formali- 



VOL. II. 



