ppens in such cases,
become the victim of plots.

[B.C. 18 (a. u. 736)]

The breastplate which he often wore beneath his dress even on entering
the senate itself he expected would be of small and slight assistance to
him in that case. Therefore he himself first added five years to his term
as supreme ruler when the ten-year period had expired (this took place in
the consulship of Publius and Gnaeus Lentulus), and then he gave Agrippa
many rights almost equal to his own, together with the tribunician
authority for the same length of time. He then said that so many years
would suffice them. Not much later he obtained the remaining five
belonging to his imperial sovereignty, so that the number of years became
ten again.

[-13-] When he had done this he next investigated the senatorial body.
The members seemed to him even now to be numerous and he saw
danger in so large a throng, while he felt a hatred for not only such as
were notorious for some baseness, but also those who were distinguished
for their flattery. And when no one, as previously, would resign willingly
nor wished alone to incur accusation, he himself selected the thirty best
men (a point which he confirmed by oath) and bade them after first taking
the same oath to choose and write down groups of five, outside of their
relatives, on tablets. After this he subjected the groups of five to a
casting of lots, with the arrangement that the one man in each who drew
a lot should himself be a senator, and enroll five others on the same
conditions.

There would, of course, properly be thirty of those chosen by others and
by those who drew a lot. And since some of them were out of town others
drew as substitutes and attended to what should have been their duties.
At first this went on so for several days; but when some abuses crept
in, he no longer put the documents in the charge of the quaestors nor
submitted the groups of five to lot, but he himself read whatever
remained and he himself chose the members that were lacking: and thus six
hundred in all were appointed. [-14-]It had been his plan to make them
three hundred as in old times, and he thought he ought to be well
satisfied if he found so many of them worthy of the senate. But he
finally chose a list of six hundred because of the universal displeasure;
for it came out, by reason of the fact that those whose names would be
cancelled would be many more than those who remained in the body, that
greater fear of