lar bench. For,
to say nothing of the countless acts of wickedness committed by him
while consul in the city, during which time he has squandered a vast
amount of public money, restored exiles without any law, sold our
revenues to all sorts of people, removed provinces from the empire of
the Roman people, given men kingdoms for bribes, imposed laws on the
city by violence, besieged the senate, and, at other times, excluded
it from the senate-house by force of arms;--to say nothing, I say, of
all this, do you not consider this, that he who has attacked Mutina, a
most powerful colony of the Roman people--who has besieged a general
of the Roman people, who is consul elect--who has laid waste the
lands,--do you not consider, I say, how shameful and iniquitous a
thing it would be for that man to be received into this order, by
which he has been so repeatedly pronounced an enemy for these very
reasons?

I have said enough of the shamefulness of such a proceeding; I will
now speak next, as I proposed, of the danger of it; which, although it
is not so important to avoid as shame, still offends the minds of the
greater part of mankind even more.

VI. Will it then be possible for you to rely on the certainty of any
peace, when you see Antonius, or rather the Antonii, in the city?
Unless, indeed, you despise Lucius: I do not despise even Caius. But,
as I think, Lucius will be the dominant spirit,--for he is the patron
of the five-and-thirty tribes, whose votes he took away by his law, by
which he divided the magistracies in conjunction with Caius Caesar.
He is the patron of the centuries of the Roman knights, which also he
thought fit to deprive of the suffrages: he is the patron of the men
who have been military tribunes; he is the patron of the middle of
Janus. O ye gods! who will be able to support this man's power?
especially when he has brought all his dependants into the lands. Who
ever was the patron of all the tribes? and of the Roman knights? and
of the military tribunes? Do you think that the power of even the
Gracchi was greater than that of this gladiator will be? whom I have
called gladiator, not in the sense in which sometimes Marcus Antonius
too is called gladiator, but as men call him who are speaking plain
Latin. He has fought in Asia as a mirmillo. After having equipped his
own companion and intimate friend in the armour of a Thracian, he slew
the miserable man as he was flying; but he himself received a palpab