Chap. 45.] TEK FOETUNATE CIECIIMSTAKCES, 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,^^ 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,^^ 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 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^^ by the very man whom he had 
Yal. Maximus, 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. Qusest. B. i. 
0. 35.— B. 
Dalechamps remarks, that we find in the ancient historians a similar 
account relative to M. Drusus, who, when tribune of the people, hurried 
oif 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. 
This attack of Labeo on Metellus is mentioned in the Epitome of Livy, 
B. lix. The tribunes of Eome were styled " sacrosancti," and it Avas 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 MeteUus 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. 
^6 Cicero, in his oration " Pro Domo 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- 
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