6.
[
14]
Wherefore, I will embrace every consideration in my opinion which I am now going
to deliver, a course to which you, I feel sure, have no objection; in order that
authority may be conferred by us on admirable generals, and that hope of reward
may be held out by us to gallant soldiers, and that a formal decision may be
come to, not by words only, but also by actions, that Antonius is not only not a
consul, but is even an enemy. For if he be consul, then the legions which have
deserted the consul deserve beating
1 to death. Caesar is wicked, Brutus is
impious, since they of their own heads have levied an army against the consul.
But if new honors are to be sought out for the soldiers on account of their
divine and immortal merits, and if it is quite impossible to show gratitude
enough to the generals, who is there who must not think that man a public enemy,
whose conduct is such that those who are in arms against him are considered the
saviors of the republic?
[
15]
Again, how insulting is he in his edicts! how ignorant! how like a barbarian! In
the first place, how has he heaped abuse on Caesar, in terms drawn from his
recollection of his own debauchery and profligacy For w here can we find anyone
who is chaster than this young man? Who is more modest? where have we among our
youth a more illustrious example of the old-fashioned strictness.? Who, on the
other hand, is more profligate than the man who abuses him? He reproaches the
son of Caius. Caesar with his want of noble blood, when even his natural
2 father,
if he had been alive, would have been made consul. His mother is a woman of
Aricia. You might suppose he was
saving a woman of
Tralles or of
Ephesus. Just see how we all who
come from the municipal towns—that is to say, absolutely all of
us—are looked down upon, for how few of us are there who do not come
from those towns? and what municipal town is there which he does not despise who
looks with such contempt on
Aricia,
a town most ancient as to its antiquity; if we regard its rights, united with us
by treaty; if we regard its vicinity, almost close to us; if we regard the high
character of its inhabitants, most honorable?
[
16]
It is from
Aricia that we have
received the Voconian and Atinian laws; from
Aricia have come many of those magistrates who have filled our
curule chairs, both in our fathers' recollection and in our own; from
Aricia have sprung many of the best and
bravest of the Roman knights. But if you disapprove of a wife from
Aricia, why do you approve of one from
Tusculum? Although the father
of this most virtuous and excellent woman, Marcus Atius Balbus, a man of the
highest character, was a man of praetorian rank; but the father of your
wife,—a good woman, at all events a rich one,—a fellow of
the name of Bambalio, was a man of no account at all. Nothing could be lower
than he was, a fellow who got his surname as a sort of insult, derived
3 from the hesitation of his speech
and the stolidity of his understanding. Oh, but your grandfather was nobly born.
Yes, he was that Tuditanus who used to put on a cloak and buskins, and then go
and scatter money from the rostra among the people. I wish he had bequeathed his
contempt of money to his descendants! You have, indeed, a most glorious nobility
of family!
[
17]
But how does it happen that the
son of a woman of
Aricia appears to
you to be ignoble, when you are accustomed to boast of a descent on the mother's
side which is precisely the same?
4 Besides, what insanity
is it for that man to say any thing about the want of noble birth in men's
wives, when his father married Numitoria of
Fregellae, the daughter of a traitor, and when he himself has
begotten children of the daughter of a freedman. However, those illustrious men
Lucius Philippus, who has a wife who came from
Aricia, and Caius Marcellus, whose wife is the daughter of an
Arician, may look to this; and I am quite sure that they have no regrets on the
score of the dignity of those admirable women.