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49While they were in this frame of mind Rufus and Titus Munatius Plancus took them in hand and excited them to greater wrath. As tribunes they conveyed the body into the Forum just before dawn, placed it on the rostra, exhibited it to all, and spoke appropriate words over it with lamentations. 2So the populace, as a result of what it both saw and heard, was deeply stirred and no longer showed any regard for things sacred or profane, but overthrew all the customs of burial and burned down nearly the whole city. They took up the body of Clodius and carried it into the senate-house, laid it out properly, and then after heaping up a pyre out of the benches burned both the corpse and the building. 3They did not do this under the stress of such an impulse as often takes sudden hold of crowds, but with such deliberate purpose that at the ninth hour they held the funeral feast in the Forum itself, with the senate-house still smouldering; and they furthermore undertook to apply the torch to Milo’s house. 4It was not burned, however, because many defended it. But Milo, in great terror because of the murder, was meanwhile in hiding, being guarded not only by ordinary citizens but also by knights and some senators; and when this other deed occurred, he hoped that the wrath of the senate would shift to the outrage of the opposing faction. 5The senators, indeed, did at once assemble on the Palatine late in the afternoon for this very purpose, and they voted that an interrex should be chosen, and that he and the tribunes and Pompey should look after the guarding of the city, so that it should suffer no harm. Milo, accordingly, made his appearance in public, and pressed his claims to the office as strongly as before, if not more strongly.
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