you two children, and at an advanced
age married another, a mere girl, in order that you might pay your debts
out of her property? And you did not even retain her, to the end that you
might keep Caerellia fearlessly, whom you debauched when she was as much
older than yourself as the maiden you married was younger, and to whom
you write such letters as a jester at no loss for words would write if
he were trying to get up an amour with a woman seventy years old.
This, which is not altogether to my taste, I have been induced to say,
Conscript Fathers, in the hope that he should not go away without getting
as good as he sent in the discussion. Again, he has ventured to reproach
Antony for a little kind of banquet, because he, as he says, drinks
water, his purpose being to sit up at night and compose speeches against
us,--though he brings up his son in such drunkenness that the latter is
sober neither night nor day. Furthermore he undertook to make derogatory
remarks about Antony's mouth, this man who has shown so great
licentiousness and impurity throughout his entire life that he would not
keep his hands off even his closest kin, but let out his wife for hire
and deflowered his daughter.

[-18-] "These particulars I shall leave as they stand and return to the
point where I started. That Antony against whom he has inveighed, seeing
Caesar exalted over our government, caused him by granting what seemed
personal favors to a friend not to put into effect any of the projects
that he had in mind. Nothing so diverts persons from objects which they
may attain without caring to secure them righteously, as for those who
fear such results to appear to endure the former's conduct willingly.
These persons in authority have no regard for their own consciousness of
guilt, but if they think they have been detected, they are ashamed and
afraid: thereafter they usually take what is said to them as flattery and
believe the opposite, and any action which may result from the words as
a plot, being suspicious in the midst of their shame. Antony knew
this thoroughly, and first of all he selected the Lupercalia and that
procession in order that Caesar in the relaxation of his spirit and the
fun of the affair might be rebuked with immunity, and next he selected
the Forum and the rostra that his patron might be shamed by the very
places. And he fabricated the commands from the populace, in order that
hearing them Caesar might reflect not on what Ant