So colourless a solution was, however, not at all to the taste of the public, which was deeply moved by the sacrilege, and roused to fury against these great families who abused their power in so scandalous a way. The public demanded a severer punishment. The small Pietist party, feeling itself backed by public opinion, brought the matter before the Senate, by the mouth of an obscure Senator named Quintus Cornificius. Cornificius proposed that the College of Pontiffs be consulted, and their opinion asked as to the gravity and character of the crime committed by Clodius. The proposal was an ingenious one. According to ancient ideas, it was incumbent on the State itself to take precautions that the gods should have no motive for losing their tempers with the people and the city, and thereupon wreaking vengeance upon Rome. With the public thrown into such a state of fear and commotion by Clodius’s sacrilege, the Senate could not refuse to consult the Pontiffs, to learn from them whether this act constituted an outrage against the gods, and, if so, an outrage of what gravity. The College of Pontiffs answered that the act was _nefas_—the technical expression which indicated the gravest of delinquencies towards the divinity. Their answer could not have been otherwise. Nevertheless, however _nefas_ the act might be, there was no law which punished it. So when the answer of the College of Pontiffs reached the Senators, the latter found themselves confronted with the following situation. A very grave and scandalous crime had been committed by one of the best-known members of the aristocracy. This crime had stirred the public indignation to its depths, and had been declared _nefas_ by the College of Pontiffs. Yet there was no way of punishing it, because the arsenal of the law did not provide the weapons necessary for its punishment. The danger inherent in this state of affairs was obvious. The public, infuriated and dismayed, would never believe that Clodius could not be punished—because the laws had never even imagined that such an abomination could ever be committed by a Roman. The public would declare that Clodius had escaped his richly-deserved punishment because he belonged to one of the most conspicuous and influential families in Rome. The aristocracy was superior to the law; it could even provoke with impunity the wrath of the gods against the city! What was to be done? Public opinion, in its agitated state, kept egging on the Senate; and the Pietist and ruthless party, profiting by the popular agitation, attempted a daring move, proposing to the Senate that it should invite the Consuls to make a special law, which should have retrospective force, and should declare Clodius’s act on a plane with the crime of incest,—make it equivalent, that is, to the seduction of a vestal virgin, a crime which, according to ancient law, was punishable with death, and which fell to be judged by the College of Pontiffs.