the Senate; you are said to excel in the art of
bridling and subduing your anger, and stifling or concealing your
resentments. You have been a most successful general, of long experience,
great conduct, and much personal courage. You have gained many important
victories for the commonwealth, and forced the strongest towns in
Mesopotamia to surrender, for which frequent supplications have been
decreed by the Senate. Yet with all these qualities, and this merit, give
me leave to say, you are neither beloved by the patricians, or plebeians
at home, nor by the officers or private soldiers of your own army abroad:
And, do you know, Crassus, that this is owing to a fault, of which you
may cure yourself, by one minutes reflection? What shall I say? You are
the richest person in the commonwealth; you have no male child, your
daughters are all married to wealthy patricians; you are far in the
decline of life; and yet you are deeply stained with that odious and
ignoble vice of covetousness:[8] It is affirmed, that you descend even to
the meanest and most scandalous degrees of it; and while you possess so
many millions, while you are daily acquiring so many more, you are
solicitous how to save a single sesterce, of which a hundred ignominious
instances are produced, and in all men's mouths. I will only mention that
passage of the buskins,[9] which after abundance of persuasion, you would
hardly suffer to be cut from your legs, when they were so wet and cold,
that to have kept them on, would have endangered your life.

"Instead of using the common arguments to dissuade you from this weakness,
I will endeavour to convince you, that you are really guilty of it, and
leave the cure to your own good sense. For perhaps, you are not yet
persuaded that this is your crime, you have probably never yet been
reproached for it to your face, and what you are now told, comes from one
unknown, and it may be, from an enemy. You will allow yourself indeed to
be prudent in the management of your fortune; you are not a prodigal,
like Clodius[10] or Catiline, but surely that deserves not the name of
avarice. I will inform you how to be convinced. Disguise your person; go
among the common people in Rome; introduce discourses about yourself;
inquire your own character; do the same in your camp, walk about it in
the evening, hearken at every tent, and if you do not hear every mouth
censuring, lamenting, cursing this vice in you, and even you for this
vice,