The virtuous and even the wise princes forbade the senators and knights to embrace this scandalous profession, under pain of infamy, or what was more dreaded by those profligate wretches, of exile. The tyrants allured them to dishonour by threats and rewards. Nero once produced, in the arena, forty senators and sixty knights. Lipsius, Saturnalia, 1. ii. c. 2. He has happily corrected a passage of Suetonius, in Nerone, c. 12.