To these faithful, though often bloodthirsty, warriors the senators and knights of those days offered a contemptible contrast. Often the inheritors of great names and great traditions, the mass of them knew nothing of arms or the military virtue of their ancestors.(290) Sunk in sloth and enervated by excess, they followed Otho to the battlefield on the Po with their cooks and minions and all the apparatus of luxury.(291) In the rapid changes of fortune, from Galba to Otho, from Otho to Vitellius, from Vitellius to Vespasian, the great nobles had one guiding principle, the determination to be on the winning side. It was indeed a puzzling and anxious time for a calculating selfishness, when a reign might not last for a month, and when the adulation of Otho or Vitellius in the Senate-house was disturbed by the sound of the legions advancing from East and West. But the supple cowards of the Senate proved equal to the strain. They had the skill to flatter their momentary master without any compromising word against his probable successor. They soothed the anxieties of Vitellius with unstinted adulation, yet carefully refrained from anything reflecting on the Flavianist leaders.(292) Within a few months, full of joy and hope, which were now at last well founded, they were voting all the customary honours of a new principate to Vespasian.(293) The terror of Tiberius, Caligula, and Nero had done its work effectually. And its worst result was the hopeless self-abandonment and sluggish cowardice of a class, whose chief _raison d’être_ in every age is to maintain a tradition of gallant dignity. It is true that many of the scions of great houses were mere mendicants, ruined by confiscation or prodigality, and compelled to live on the pension by which the emperor kept them in shameful dependence,(294) or on the meaner dole of some wealthy patron.(295) A Valerius Messala, grandson of the great Corvinus, had to accept a pension from Nero.(296) A grandson of Hortensius had to endure the contempt of Tiberius in obtaining a grant for his sons.(297) Others were unmanned by the voluptuous excesses of an age which had carried the ingenuity of sensual allurement to its utmost limits. The hopelessness of any struggle with a power so vast as that of the emperor, so ruthless and wildly capricious as that of the Claudian Caesars, reduced many to despairing apathy.(298) And while, from a safe historic distance, we pour our contempt on the cringing Senate of the first century, it might be well to remind ourselves of their perils and their tortures. There was many a senatorial house, like that of the Pisos, whose leading members were never allowed to reach middle age.(299) Much should be forgiven to a class which was daily and hourly exposed to such danger, so sudden in its onsets, so secret and stealthy, so all-pervading. It might come in an open circumstantial indictment, with all the forms of law and the weight of suborned testimony; it might appear in a quiet order for suicide; the stroke might descend at the farthest limits of the Empire,(300) in some retreat in Spain or Asia. The haunting fear of death had an unnerving effect. But not less degrading were the outrages to Roman, or ordinary human dignity to which the noble order had to submit for more than a generation. They had seen their wives defiled or compelled to expose themselves as harlots in a foul spectacle, to gratify the diseased prurience of the emperor.(301) They had been forced to fight in the arena or to exhibit themselves on the tragic stage.(302) Men who had borne the ancient honours of the consulship had been ordered to run for miles beside the chariot of Caligula, or to wait at his feet at dinner.(303) Fathers had had to witness without flinching the execution of their sons, and drink smilingly to the emperor on the evening of the fatal day.(304) The only safety at such a court lay in calmly accepting insults with affected gratitude. The example of Nero’s debauchery, and the seductive charm which he undoubtedly possessed, were probably as enfeebling and demoralising as the Terror. He formed a school, which laughed at all virtue and made self-indulgence a fine art. Men who had shared in these obscene revels were the leaders in the awful scenes of perfidy, lust, and cruelty which appropriately followed the death of their patron.(305) Some of them, Petronius, Otho, Vitellius, closed their career appropriately by a tragic death. But others lived on into the age of reformation, to defame the stout Sabine soldier who saved the Roman world.(306)