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Meanwhile, with Lentulus and Cassius, the clients of your houses being armed beneath their togas with swords and breast-plates, and casques ready to be donned, I will make sure of Cicero and the rest. Havoc, and slaughter, and flames every where will make the city ours.
None but barbarians intoxicated with blood-lust would dare to assault men of such patriarchal dignity. They numbered more than two hundred. Between them were vacant seats of senators unable to attend, and over the concentric rows of marble chairs the white togas spread out like newly fallen snow upon a crust of ice.
Perhaps three-fourths of the distance had been covered at the expense of torn togas and bruised sides, when a sudden commotion in front showed that something was happening. The next moment the hard, stern face of Marcus Pomponius Matho, the praetor peregrinus, rose above the crowd, and then the broad purple band upon his toga, as he mounted the steps of the Rostra.
With this he drew the hem of his toga over his head, and rushed from the door in the direction of the Capitoline temple. He was followed by a crowd of senators, all wrapping the folds of their togas round their left arms. Outside the door they were joined by their retainers armed with clubs and staves. Meanwhile the proceedings in the Area Capitolii had been becoming somewhat less turbulent.
The emperor surveyed it closely. "Let me hold it up to the light and then you will see its texture," the other continued. "You are a hard master," said Augustus. "You would have us walk on the house-tops to show the fineness of our togas? It is enough. Let us pass, good people." A cheer, starting at the shop door, went to the far sides of the city.
For very cold weather both men and women were provided with togas for their protection. Sometimes the men would have a bearskin or elkskin for a toga; more often they made their togas by piecing together the skins of wolves, mountain lions, wolverines, wild cats, beavers, and otters. The women sometimes made theirs of fawnskins, but rabbitskin robes were far more common.
There they sat, even in the midst of the general excitement, a body of calm, dignified elders, severe and immaculate in their long white togas and purple-edged tunics. The multitudes without were howling and jeering; within the temple, reigned silence the silence that gathered about the most august and powerful assembly the world has ever seen. Ex-prætors and ex-ædiles.
What do I care," shouted Smith, "whether we were Romans and wore togas? We are due this century at a house party on this planet. They expect us on this train. Are you coming? If not kindly relax that crablike clutch on my elbow before partial paralysis ensues." "Smith, wait! I tell you this is somehow becoming strangely portentous.
And Melissa, whose feminine curiosity had already tempted her to the window, looked down into the quadrangle and on to the steps down which a maniple of the praetorian guard were marching, with noble Romans in togas or the uniform of legates, augurs wearing wreaths, and priests of various orders.
The strains of the Garrison band, too, invite us to linger yet, as the sweet airs of the reminiscences of Scotland whisper among the branches. Sombre-clad priests, in long togas and shovel hats, bustle about here and there, now talking cheerfully to one lady, now looking correction at another; but all enjoying themselves with as much evident pleasure as their more mundane flocks.