It was a moment pregnant with menace. Later generations, with the benefit of hindsight, would see in it the great turning point of which the augurs had warned: the passing of an old age, the dawning of a new. Certainly, with the march on Rome of a Roman army, a watershed had been reached. Something like innocence had gone. Competition for honors had always been the lifeblood of the Republic, but now something deadly had been introduced into it, and its presence there, a lurking toxin, could not easily be forgotten. Defeat in elections, or in a lawsuit, or in a debate in the Senate—these had
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