an ex-praetor or an ex-consul,--should assume
foreign office until five years should have elapsed: this they did to
see if people when it was no longer in any one's power to be immediately
elected would cease their craze for office. For no moderation was being
shown and there was no purity in their methods, but they vied with one
another in expending great sums and fighting more than ever, so that
once the consul Calvinus was wounded. Hence no consul nor praetor nor
prefect of the city had any successor, but at the beginning of the year
the Romans were absolutely without a government in these branches.

[B.C. 52 (_a.u._ 702)]

[-47-] Nothing good resulted from this, and among other things the
market recurring every ninth day was held on the very first of January.
This seemed to the Romans to have taken place not by accident, and being
considered in the light of a portent it caused trepidation. The same
feeling was increased when an owl was both seen and caught in the city,
a statue exuded perspiration for three days, a flash darted from the
south to the east, and many thunderbolts, many clods, stones, tiles and
blood descended through the air. It seems to me that that decree passed
the previous year, near the close, with regard to Serapis and Isis, was
a portent equal to any: the senate decided to tear down their temples,
which some private individuals had built. For they did not reverence
these gods any long time and even when it became the fashion to render
public devotion to them, they settled them outside the pomerium.

[-48-] Such being the state of things in the city, with no one in charge
of affairs, murders occurred practically every day and they did not
finish the elections, though they were eager for office and employed
bribery and assassination on account of it. Milo, for instance, who was
seeking the consulship, met Clodius on the Appian Way and at first
simply wounded him: then, fearing he would attack him for what had been
done, he slew him. He at once freed all the servants concerned in the
business, and his hope was that he might be more easily acquitted of the
murder, now that the man was dead, than he would be for the wound in
case he had survived. The people in the city heard of this about evening
and were thrown into a terrible uproar: for to factional disturbances
there was being added a starting-point for war and evils, and the middle
class, even though they hated Clodius, yet on account of human