III. For a long time, when internal or external troubles were apprehended, Rome was put, so to speak, in a state of siege, by the sacramental formula, according to which the consuls were enjoined _to see that the Republic received no injury_; then the power of the consuls was unlimited;[943] and often, in seditions, the Senate had profited by this omnipotence to rid itself of certain factious individuals without observing the forms of justice. The more frequent the agitations had become, the more they had used this extreme remedy. The tribunes always protested ineffectually against a measure which suspended all the established laws, legalised assassination, and made Rome a battle-field. Labienus tried anew to blunt in the hands of the Senate so formidable a weapon. Thirty-seven years before, as will be remembered, Saturninus, the violent promoter of an agrarian law, had, by the aid of a riot, obtained possession of the Capitol; the country had been declared in danger. The tribune perished in the struggle, and the senator C. Rabirius boasted of having killed him. Despite this long interval of time, Labienus accused Rabirius under an old law of _perduellio_, which did not leave to the guilty, like the law of treason, the power of voluntary exile, but, by declaring him a public enemy, authorised against him cruel and ignominious punishments.[944] This procedure provoked considerable agitation; the Senate, which felt the blow struck at its privileges, was unwilling to put any one to trial for the execution of an act authorised by itself. The people and the tribunes, on the contrary, insisted that the accused should be brought before a tribunal. Every passion was at work. Labienus claimed to avenge one of his uncles, massacred with Saturninus; and he had the audacity to expose in the Campus Martius the portrait of the factious tribune, forgetting the case of Sextus Titius, condemned, on a former occasion, for the mere fact of having preserved in his house the likeness of Saturninus.[945] The affair was brought, according to ancient usage, before the decemvirs. Cæsar, and his cousin Lucius Cæsar, were designated by the prætor to perform the functions of judges. The very violence of the accusation, compared with the eloquence of his defenders, Hortensius and Cicero, overthrew the charge of _perduellio_. Nevertheless, Rabirius, condemned, appealed to the people; but the animosity against him was so great that the fatal sentence was about to be irrevocably pronounced, when the prætor, Metellus Celer, devised a stratagem to arrest the course of justice; he carried away the standard planted at the Janiculum.[946] This battered flag formerly announced an invasion of the country round Rome. Immediately all deliberation ceased, and the people rushed to arms. The Romans were great formalists; and, moreover, as this custom left to the magistrates the power of dissolving at their will the comitia, they had the most