careers, but not to be the last or greatest prize of a man whose stately presence, unbending dignity, and apparent simplicity of purpose, could generally awe the people into respect, and whose keenness of vision and talent for intrigue impressed the senatorial mind with a sense of his power to save, when claims were pressing and difficulties acute.[796] His consulship, though without brilliancy, added to the respectable laurels that he had already attained. A successful raid on some Illyrian tribes[797] showed at least that he had retained the physical endurance of his youth; while his legislation on sumptuary matters and the freedman's vote showed the spirit of a milder Cato, and the moderate conservatism, not distasteful to the Roman of pure blood, which would preserve the preponderance in political power to the citizen untainted by the stain of servitude. A stormy event of his period of office gave the crowd an opportunity of seeing the severity with which a magistrate of the older school could avenge an affront to the dignity of his office. Publius Decius, who was believed to be a conscious imitator of Fulvius Flaccus in the exaggerated vehemence of his oratory, and who had already proved by his prosecution of Opimius that he was ready to defend certain features of the Gracchan cause even when such championship was fraught with danger, was in possession of the urban praetorship at the time when Scaurus held the consulship. One day the consul passed the open court of justice when the praetor was giving judgment from the curule chair. Decius remained seated, either in feigned oblivion or in ostentatious disregard of the presence of his superior. The politic wrath of Scaurus was aroused; an enemy had been delivered into his hands, and the people might be given an object-lesson of the way in which the most vehement champion of popular rights was, even when covered with the dignity of a magistracy, but a straw in the iron grasp of the higher Imperium. The consul ordered Decius to rise, his official robe to be rent, the chair of justice to be shattered in pieces, and published a warning that no future litigant should resort to the court of the contumacious praetor.[798] The vulgar mind is impressed, when it is not angered, by such scenes of violence. A repute for sternness is the best cloak for the flexibility which, if revealed, would excite suspicion. Scaurus to the popular mind was an embodiment of stiff patrician dignity, perhaps happily devoid of that touch of insolence which is often the mark of a career assured without a struggle; of a self-complacent dignity, quietly conscious of its own deserts and demanding their due reward, of the calmness of a soul that is above suspicion and refuses to admit even in its inmost sanctuary the thought that its motives can be impugned. Meanwhile certain disrespectful onlookers were expressing wonder at his mysteriously growing wealth and marvelling as to its source.