n Gaul, you ordered me to
administer the public finances, you gave me the legions from Macedonia.'
Perhaps these measures were voted--yet ought you to put it that way, and
not instead exact punishment from him for his action in compelling you to
make that decision? At any rate, you never at any time gave him the
right to restore the exiles, to add laws surreptitiously, to sell the
privileges of citizenship and exemption from taxes, to steal the public
funds, to plunder the possessions of allies, to abuse the cities, or
to undertake to play the tyrant over his native country. And you never
conceded to any one else all that was desired, though you have granted by
your votes many things to many persons; on the contrary you have always
punished such men so far as you could, as you will also punish him, if
you take my advice. For it is not in these matters alone that he has
shown himself to be such a man as you know and have seen him to be, but
briefly in all undertakings which he has ever attempted to perform for
the commonwealth.

[-26-] "His private life and his private examples of licentiousness
and avarice I shall willingly pass over, not because one would fail to
discover that he had committed many abominable outrages in the course of
them, but because, by Hercules, I am ashamed to describe minutely and
separately--especially to you who know it as well as I--how he conducted
his youth among you who were boys at the time, how he auctioned off
the vigor of his prime, his secret lapses from chastity, his open
fornications, what he let be done to him as long as it was possible, what
he did as early as he could, his revels, his periods of drunkenness, and
all the rest that follows in their train. It is impossible for a person
brought up in so great licentiousness and shamelessness to avoid defiling
his entire life: and so from his private concerns he brought his lewdness
and greed to bear upon public matters. On this I will refrain from
dilating, and likewise by Jupiter on his visit to Gabinius in Egypt
and his flight to Caesar in Gaul, that I may not be charged with going
minutely into every detail; for I feel ashamed for you, that knowing him
to be such a man you appointed him tribune and master of the horse and
subsequently consul. I will at present recite only his drunken insolence
and abuses in these very positions.

[-27-] "Well, then, when he was tribune he first of all prevented you
from settling suitably the work