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7.
Yes, your consulship, forsooth, is a salutary one for the state, mine a
mischievous one. Have you so entirely lost all shame as well as all chastity,
that you could venture to say this in that temple in which I was consulting that
senate which formerly in the full enjoyment of its honors presided over the
world? And did you place around it abandoned men armed with swords?
[16]
But you have dared besides (what is there which you
would not dare?) to say that the Capito line Hill, when I was consul was full of
aimed slaves. I was offering violence to the senate, I suppose, in order to
compel the adoption of those infamous decrees of the senate. O wretched man,
whether those things are not known to you (for you know nothing that is good),
or whether they are, when you dare to speak so shamelessly before such men! For
what Roman knight was there, what youth of noble birth except you, what man of
any rank or class who recollected that he was a citizen, who was not on the
Capitoline Hill while the senate
was assembled in this temple? who was there, who did not give in his name?
Although there could not be provided checks enough, nor were the books able to
contain their names.
[17]
In truth, when wicked men, being compelled by the revelations of the accomplices,
by their own handwriting, and by what I may almost call the voices of their
letters, were confessing that they had planned the parricidal destruction of
their country, and that they had agreed to burn the city, to massacre the
citizens, to devastate Italy, to
destroy the republic; who could have existed without being roused to defend the
common safety? especially when the senate and people of Rome had a leader then, and if they had one
now like he was then, the same fate would befall you which did overtake them.
[18]
He asserts that the body of his stepfather was not allowed burial by me. But this
is an assertion that was never made by Publius Clodius, a man whom, as I was
deservedly an enemy of his, I grieve now to see surpassed by you in every sort
of vice. But how could it occur to you to recall to our recollection that you
had been educated in the house of Publius Lentulus? Were you afraid that we
might think that you could have turned out as infamous as you are by the mere
force of nature, your natural qualities had not been strengthened by education?
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