ious wickedness if it was the blood of citizens. How long, then,
is that man, who has surpassed all enemies in wickedness, to be spared
the name of enemy? unless you wish to see the very swords of our
soldiers trembling in their hands while they doubt whether they are
piercing a citizen or an enemy. You vote a supplication; you do not
call Antonius an enemy. Very pleasing indeed to the immortal gods will
our thanksgivings be, very pleasing too the victims, after a multitude
of our citizens has been slain! "For the victory," says the proposer
of the supplication, "over wicked and audacious men." For that is what
this most illustrious man calls them; expressions of blame suited to
lawsuits carried on in the city, not denunciations of searing infamy
such as deserved by internecine war. I suppose they are forging wills,
or trespassing on their neighbours, or cheating some young men; for it
is men implicated in these and similar practices that we are in the
habit of terming wicked and audacious. One man, the foulest of all
banditti, is waging an irreconcileable war against four consuls. He
is at the same time carrying on war against the senate and people of
Rome. He is (although he is himself hastening to destruction, through
the disasters which he has met with) threatening all of us with
destruction, and devastation, and torments, and tortures. He declares
that that inhuman and savage act of Dolabella's, which no nation of
barbarians would have owned, was done by his advice; and what he
himself would do in this city, if this very Jupiter, who now looks
down upon us assembled in his temple, had not repelled him from this
temple and from these walls, he showed, in the miseries of those
inhabitants of Parma, whom, virtuous and honourable men as they were,
and most intimately connected with the authority of this order, and
with the dignity of the Roman people, that villain and monster, Lucius
Antonius, that object of the extraordinary detestation of all men,
and (if the gods hate those whom they ought) of all the gods also,
murdered with every circumstance of cruelty. My mind shudders at the
recollection, O conscript fathers, and shrinks from relating the
cruelties which Lucius Antonius perpetrated on the children and
wives of the citizens of Parma. For whatever infamy the Antonii have
willingly undergone in their own persons to their own infamy, they
triumph in the fact of having inflicted on others by violence. But it
is a mis