One garrulous old senator anxious for a chance to speak, indeed begins shouting “_Consule! Consule!_” (“Take counsel!”--_i.e._ start a debate.) If many others join him, Varus can be forced to permit a long-winded discussion; but the troublemaker is without a second. The senators with one accord seem rising and passing to the right side of the Curia. Nobody ventures to go to the left. The motion thus carries unanimously. The company resume their seats; then all eyes are again upon the consul when with clear voice he commands: “Let the accusers of Sextus Annius Pedius stand forth.” =291. Presenting an Impeachment at a Senate Trial.=--Publius Calvus rises from the front benches opposite the defendant, allows the many folds of his toga to fall magnificently around him, thrusting them back just enough to reveal the purple laticlave running down his tunic, and carefully adjusts a ring so its great emerald will give precisely the correct flash as he gestures. Directly behind him, inconspicuously garbed stands a favorite freedman, avowedly to pass him papyri and tablets which he will read, but really quite as much to whisper, “Drop your tones!” “Speak louder!” or “Not so shrill!” and like promptings as the oration progresses.[182] The Senate, of course, cannot be expected to put in weary days listening to intricate and sordid testimony. All this has been taken before a special board of judges, and on their report there is no real doubt of Pedius’s guilt. He has taken a bribe of 300,000 sesterces ($12,000) to banish a Roman eques from his province and has put seven less-protected provincials, friends of this eques, to death; worse still, he has taken still another bribe of 700,000 sesterces ($28,000) for committing the unspeakable outrage of causing yet a second eques to be first beaten with rods, next hustled off to the mines, then actually strangled in prison. The prominent provincials from Asia have, therefore, presented an absolute case against their evil ex-governor. The lesser culprits have mostly confessed and received appropriate penalties--and the only question really before the Senate is fixing the punishment of Pedius. He is a great noble with great connections. Ought a senator who has held the consulship be banished and ruined even if he _has_ misgoverned his province, taken bribes and done to death an eques--one of those upstart half-nobles whom every true senator should scorn? Pedius does not lack friends who have told him to brazen it out, and that no severe penalty can befall him; and he glares defiantly across to Calvus as the latter begins his argument.