being conveyed to the senate-house in a chariot whenever he went to the senate:[1215] a great distinction, no doubt, but bought at the price of his sight. (44.) The son also, of the same Q. Metellus, who has given the above account of his father, is considered himself to have been one of the rarest instances of human felicity.[1216] For, in addition to the very considerable honours which he obtained, and the surname which he acquired from the conquest of Macedonia, he was carried to the funeral pile by his four sons,[1217] one of whom had been prætor, three of them consuls, two had obtained triumphs, and one had been censor; each of which honours falls to the lot of a very few only. And yet, in the very full-blown pride of his dignity, as he was returning from the Campus Martius at mid-day, when the Forum and the Capitol are deserted, he was seized by the tribune, Caius Atinius Labeo,[1218] surnamed Macerion, whom, during his censorship, he had ejected from the senate, and was dragged by him to the Tarpeian rock, for the purpose of being precipitated therefrom. The numerous band, however, who called him by the name of father, flew to his assistance, though tardily, and only just, as it were, at the very last moment, to attend his funeral obsequies, seeing that he could not lawfully offer resistance, or repel force by force in the sacred case of a tribune;[1219] and he was just on the very point of perishing, the victim of his virtues and the strictness of his censorship, when he was saved by the intervention of another tribune,—only obtained with the greatest difficulty,—and so rescued from the very jaws of death. He afterwards had to subsist on the bounty of others, his property having been consecrated[1220] by the very man whom he had degraded; and who, as if that had not satiated his vengeance, still farther wreaked his malice upon him, by throwing a rope around his neck,[1221] and twisting it with such extreme violence that the blood flowed from out of his ears.[1222] And for my part, too, I should look upon it as in the number of his misfortunes, to have been the enemy of the second Africanus; indeed, Macedonicus, in this instance, bears testimony against himself; for he said to his sons, “Go, my children, render the last duties to Scipio; you will never witness the funeral of a greater citizen than him;” and this speech he made to his sons, one of whom had already acquired the surname of Balearicus, and another of Diadematus,[1223] he himself at the time bearing that of Macedonicus.