again of its own
act eluded treatment.[115] For should I put briefly what has occurred
since you left, you would certainly exclaim that the Roman empire cannot
be maintained much longer. Well, after your departure our first scene,
I think, was the appearance of the Clodian scandal, in which having, as
I thought, got an opportunity of pruning licentiousness and keeping our
young men within bounds, I exerted myself to the utmost, and lavished
all the resources of my intellect and genius, not from dislike to an
individual, but from the hope of not merely correcting, but of
completely curing the state. The Republic received a crushing blow when
this jury was won over by money and the opportunity of debauchery. See
what has followed! We have had a consul inflicted upon us, whom none
except us philosophers can look at without a sigh. What a blow that is!
Though a decree of the senate has been passed about bribery and the
corruption of juries, no law has been carried; the senate has been
harassed to death, the Roman knights alienated. So that one year has
undermined two buttresses of the Republic, which owed their existence to
me, and me alone; for it has at once destroyed the prestige of the
senate and broken up the harmony of the orders. And now enter this
precious year! It was inaugurated by the suspension of the annual rites
of Iuventas;[116] for Memmius initiated M. Lucullus's wife in some rites
of his own! Our Menelaus, being annoyed at that, divorced his wife. Yet
the old Idaean shepherd had only injured Menelaus; our Roman Paris
thought Agamemnon as proper an object of injury as Menelaus.[117] Next
there is a certain tribune named C. Herennius, whom you, perhaps, do not
even know--and yet you may know him, for he is of your tribe, and his
father Sextus used to distribute money to your tribesmen--this person is
trying to transfer P. Clodius to the plebs, and is actually proposing a
law to authorize the whole people to vote in Clodius's affair in the
_campus_.[118] I have given him a characteristic reception in the
senate, but he is the thickest-skinned fellow in the world. Metellus is
an excellent consul, and much attached to me, but he has lowered his
influence by promulgating (though only for form's sake) an identical
bill about Clodius. But the son of Aulus,[119] God in heaven! What a
cowardly and spiritless fellow for a soldier! How well he deserves to be
exposed, as he is, day after day to the abuse of Palicanus![12