Lentulus did not go to the banquet of Favonius, to see the unwonted
graciousness with which his niece received the advances of Lucius
Ahenobarbus, Neither was Favonius himself present at his own
entertainment. They, and several others of the high magnates of their
party, had been called away by an urgent summons, and spent the
evening in secluded conference with no less a personage than Pompeius,
or as he dearly loved to be called, "the Magnus," in his splendid
palace outside the walls on the Campus Martius. And here the conqueror
of Mithridates--a stout, soldierly man of six-and-fifty, whose best
quality was a certain sense of financial honesty, and whose worst an
extreme susceptibility to the grossest adulation--told them that he
had received letters from Labienus, Cæsar's most trusted lieutenant in
Gaul, declaring that the proconsul's troops would never fight for him,
that Cæsar would never be able to stir hand or foot against the
decrees of the Senate, and that he, Labienus, would desert him at the
first opportunity.

Cheerful news this to the noble lords, who had for years scented in
Cæsar's existence and prosperity destruction to their own oligarchic
rule of almost the known world. But when Cato, the most violent
anti-Cæsarian of them all, a sharp, wiry man with angular features,
and keen black eyes, demanded:--

"And now, Magnus, you will not hesitate to annihilate the enemies of
the Republic?" a look of pained indecision flitted across Pompeius's
face.

"_Perpol_, gentlemen," he exclaimed, "I would that I were well out of
this. Sometimes I think that you are leading me into breaking with
Cæsar for some ends of your own. He was my friend before you had a