He was yet more deeply impressed by the strength of the Roman character a little later. When he found that none of the Latins were going to join him Pyrrhus sent an ambassador to the Senate, offering terms of peace. This ambassador was loaded with costly presents for the leading Romans and their wives. All these gifts were refused. Then Pyrrhus’s envoy came before the Senate, to see whether eloquence could not do what bribes had failed to effect. He had been a pupil of the great Demosthenes, the most wonderful orator of Greece, and his golden words moved many of the senators; they thought it would be wise to make terms. But old Appius Claudius, one of the most distinguished men in Rome, the builder of the great military road known as the Appian way, had been carried into the Senate House by his sons and servants, for he was very old and nearly blind. He now rose to his feet and his speech made these senators ashamed of themselves. ‘Hitherto’, he cried, ‘I have regarded my blindness as a misfortune; but now, Romans, I wish I had been deaf as well as blind, for then I should not have heard these shameful counsels. Who is there who will not despise you and think you an easy conquest, if Pyrrhus not only escapes unconquered but gains Tarentum as a reward for insulting the Romans?’ His words stirred the senators deeply. They voted as one man to continue the war. Pyrrhus’s ambassador was told to tell his master that the Romans could not treat so long as there was an enemy on Italian soil. He told Pyrrhus that the Senate seemed to him an assembly of kings.