o would be so mad, who would be so declared an
enemy to gods and to men as to dare to mix himself up with that wicked
auction, no one was found except Antonius, even though there were
plenty of men collected round that spear[18] who would have dared
anything else. One man alone was found to dare to do that which the
audacity of every one else had shrunk from and shuddered at. Were you,
then, seized with such stupidity,--or, I should rather say, with such
insanity,--as not to see that if you, being of the rank in which you
were born, acted as a broker at all, and above all as a broker in the
case of Pompeius's property, you would be execrated and hated by the
Roman people, and that all gods and all men must at once become and
for ever continue hostile to you? But with what violence did that
glutton immediately proceed to take possession of the property of that
man, to whose valour it had been owing that the Roman people had been
more terrible to foreign nations, while his justice had made it dearer
to them.

XXVII. When, therefore, this fellow had begun to wallow in the
treasures of that great man, he began to exult like a buffoon in a
play, who has lately been a beggar, and has become suddenly rich. But,
as some poet or other says,--

"Ill gotten gain comes quickly to an end."

It is an incredible thing, and almost a miracle, how he in a few,
not months, but days, squandered all that vast wealth. There was an
immense quantity of wine, an excessive abundance of very valuable
plate, much precious apparel, great quantities of splendid furniture,
and other magnificent things in many places, such as one was
likely to see belonging to a man who was not indeed luxurious,
but who was very wealthy. Of all this in a few days there was
nothing left. What Charybdis was ever so voracious? Charybdis,
do I say? Charybdis, if she existed at all, was only one animal.
The ocean, I swear most solemnly, appears scarcely capable of
having swallowed up such numbers of things so widely scattered, and
distributed in such different places, with such rapidity. Nothing
was shut up, nothing sealed up, no list was made of anything. Whole
storehouses were abandoned to the most worthless of men. Actors seized
on this, actresses on that, the house was crowded with gamblers, and
full of drunken men, people were drinking all day, and that too in
many places, there were added to all this expense (for this fellow was
not invariably fortunate) he