In their criticism, the opposition chose their standards from the past. They wanted to turn the clock backward. Their words of praise were "ancient" or "ancestral," in Sentius' mouth. They longed for a world that, as Sentius admitted, they had never seen, known to them only through books and busts. They cultivated the memory of men who had fought against the future—Brutus, Cassius, Cato.Sentius = Gnaeus Sentius Saturninus, consul in 41 A.D.
Id., p. 41:
Over the first hundred years of the principate, people lumped together as the "opposition" shared the same kind of background in any one generation, though it was a slightly different one at different times. They were alert to the same ideas, under the same dark skies, a close group. On the periphery stood men of views and courage similar but not so extreme: Curiatius Maternus or Pliny; at the heart, someone like Thrasea Paetus. It was their receptions and banquets that emperors feared, where, after the slaves had left the room, voices got lower and zeal hotter for revolution, for "new things," in the usual phrase, novae res. Here too was where men praised old things: the Republic, Brutus, and the ancestral way of life, mos maiorum.