hold
your remarkable body, so corpulent and detestable, and to hear your
accursed voice, choked with unguent, speaking those outrageous words; for
I will preferably confine my comment to this point about your mouth. The
Lupercalia would not have missed its proper reverence, but you disgraced
the whole city at once,--not to speak a word yet about your remarks on
that occasion. Who is unaware that the consulship is public, the property
of the whole people, that its dignity must be preserved everywhere, and
that its holder must nowhere strip naked or behave wantonly? [-31-] Did
he perchance imitate the famous Horatius of old or Cloelia of bygone
days? But the latter swam across the river with all her clothing, and
the former cast himself with his armor into the flood. It would be
fitting--would it not?--to set up also a statue of this consul, so that
people might contrast the one man armed in the Tiber and the other naked
in the Forum. It was by such conduct as has been cited that those heroes
of yore were wont to preserve us and give us liberty, while he took away
all our liberty from us, so far as was in his power, destroyed the whole
democracy, set up a despot in place of a consul, a tyrant in place of
a dictator over us. You remember the nature of his language when he
approached the rostra, and the style of his behavior when he had ascended
it. But when a man who is a Roman and a consul has dared to name any one
King of the Romans in the Roman Forum, close to the rostra of liberty, in
the presence of the entire people and the entire senate, and straightway
to set the diadem upon his head and further to affirm falsely in the
hearing of us all that we ourselves bade him say and do this, what most
outrageous deed will that man not dare, and from what action, however
revolting, will he refrain? [-32-] Did we lay this injunction upon you,
Antony, we who expelled the Tarquins, who cherished Brutus, who hurled
Capitolinus headlong, who put to death the Spurii?[12] Did we order you
to salute any one as king, when we have laid a curse upon the very name
of monarch and furthermore upon that of dictator as the most similar? Did
we command you to appoint any one tyrant, we who repulsed Pyrrhus from
Italy, who drove back Antiochus beyond the Taurus, who put an end to the
tyranny even in Macedonia? No, by the rods of Valerius and the law of
Porcius, no, by the leg of Horatius and the hand of Mucius, no, by the
spear of Decius and the