Second Philippic

1 What destiny of mine, senators, am I to blame for this: that in these twenty years no one has been an enemy of the republic without also declaring war on me? I need name no names. Recall them for yourselves. They have paid me a heavier penalty than I could have wished. What astonishes me, Antony, is that you imitate their deeds without shuddering at their ends. In the others, indeed, I found it less surprising. Not one became my enemy of his own choosing: I had challenged them all in the republic’s cause. But you, whom I had not injured even by a word, attacked me unprovoked with abuse, eager to appear more reckless than Catiline, more frenzied than Clodius. You thought that estrangement from me would recommend you to disloyal citizens.

2 What am I to suppose? That he despised me? I see nothing in my life, my standing, my achievements, or even my modest abilities that Antony could look down on. Did he think the senate the easiest place to diminish my reputation? This body has testified that many distinguished citizens served the republic well, but that I alone saved it. Did he wish to meet me in a contest of eloquence? That, at least, is a kindness. What richer, more abundant theme could I have than to speak for myself and against Antony? No, this must be it: he thought his own kind would never believe him an enemy of his country unless he made himself my enemy too.

3 Before answering him on other matters, I shall say a few words about the friendship he accuses me of violating—an accusation I consider most serious.

He complained that at some time or other I had appeared against his interests. Was I not to oppose a stranger on behalf of a close and intimate friend? Was I not to oppose influence gathered through youthful beauty, not the promise of merit? Was I not to oppose an injustice he secured through the favor of a thoroughly unjust man who intervened for him, not through a praetor’s lawful judgment? But I suppose you recalled this to recommend yourself to the lowest order, reminding everyone that you had been a freedman’s son-in-law and that your children had been the grandchildren of Quintus Fadius, a freedman. Yet you had entrusted yourself to my teaching—so you said—and had often visited my house. Had you done so, you would certainly have taken better care of your reputation and your chastity. But you never did; and even had you wished to, Gaius Curio would not have allowed it.

4 You said you had yielded your candidacy for the augurship to me. Incredible audacity! Impudence worth proclaiming! When the entire college wanted me as an augur, and Gnaeus Pompey and Quintus Hortensius nominated me—for no more than two could nominate a candidate—you could not pay your debts and saw no hope of survival unless the republic were overthrown. Could you have stood for the augurship then, when Curio was not in Italy? Or, when you were eventually elected, could you have carried a single tribe without Curio? Even his associates were convicted of violence for supporting you too enthusiastically.

5 But I received a kindness from you. What kindness? I have always openly acknowledged the very thing you mention: I preferred to confess an obligation to you rather than appear insufficiently grateful to anyone whose judgment was less sound. But what was the kindness? That you did not kill me at Brundisium? The victor himself, who had made you chief among his brigands, as you used to boast, wanted me safe and ordered me to return to Italy. Would you have killed that man? Suppose you could have. What other kindness, senators, do brigands offer than the right to boast that they gave life to those from whom they did not take it? If that were a kindness, the men who killed the man who had spared them—men you yourself habitually call most illustrious—would never have won such glory. And what sort of kindness is it to have refrained from an abominable crime? I ought to have felt less pleasure that you had not murdered me than misery that you could have done so with impunity.

6 Still, let it count as a kindness, since no greater could have been received from a brigand. Where, then, can you call me ungrateful? Was I not to lament the republic’s destruction, lest I seem ungrateful to you? Yet in that lament, sorrowful and bitter, but necessary for a man in the position to which the senate and Roman people have raised me, what did I say that was insulting? What was not restrained? What was not friendly? What self-command it took to complain of Marcus Antony without abuse! Especially when you had scattered the republic’s remnants; when everything was for sale in the foul marketplace of your house; when you acknowledged laws as both concerning you and carried by you, though they had never been published beforehand; when, an augur, you had abolished the auspices, and, a consul, the right of veto; when armed men crowded disgustingly around you; when, worn out by wine and debauchery, you daily welcomed every impurity into your shameless home.

7 Yet I spoke as though my opponent were Marcus Crassus, with whom I had many serious disputes, not a single utterly worthless gladiator: I lamented the republic gravely and said nothing against the man. Today, then, I shall make him understand how great a kindness he received from me on that occasion. He even read aloud a letter he claimed I had sent him—a man without civility or any understanding of life among others. Who with the slightest knowledge of decent society has ever brought out a friend’s private letter after some quarrel and read it publicly? What is that but to abolish the fellowship of life, to abolish the conversation of absent friends? How many jokes in letters would look foolish if published! How many serious matters belong there that must never be made public!

8 Call that uncivilized. Now consider his unbelievable stupidity. What have you to bring against me, eloquent fellow—or so you seem, at least, to Seius Mustela and to Numisius Tiro? Since they are standing here now with swords in full view of the senate, I too shall think you eloquent if you show how you will defend them against a murder charge. But what, after all, could you bring against me if I denied ever sending you that letter? By what witness could you convict me? My handwriting? You have a profitable expertise in that. But how could you use it? The letter is in a secretary’s hand. I am already envious of your teacher, who is paid so much—as I shall shortly reveal—to teach you to understand nothing.

9 What is less worthy, not merely of an orator but of a human being, than to charge an opponent with something when a bare denial leaves the accuser unable to go a step further? But I do not deny it. Indeed, the letter itself convicts you not only of incivility but of madness. What word in it is not full of courtesy, consideration and goodwill? Your whole accusation is that in this letter I do not think ill of you: that I write as to a citizen, as to an honorable man, not as to a criminal and a brigand. Yet I shall not publish your letter, though your provocation gives me every right to do so. In it you ask that, with my permission, you may bring someone back from exile; you swear you will not do so against my wishes; and you obtain my consent. Why should I have set myself against your recklessness, which neither this body’s authority, nor the Roman people’s judgment, nor any laws could restrain?

10 Still, why did you need to ask me, if the man you asked about had already been recalled under Caesar’s law? Apparently he wished to make it my favor, though, once the law was passed, it could not even be his own.

But since, senators, I must say something in my defense and much against Marcus Antony, I ask one thing of you: listen kindly when I speak for myself. The other I shall secure for myself: when I speak against him, you will listen closely. I also beg this: if you have known my restraint and moderation both throughout my life and in my speech, do not think that today, in answering the challenge he has thrown down, I have forgotten who I am. I shall not treat him as a consul: neither did he treat me as a former consul. Indeed, he is no consul at all, whether you consider how he lives, how he governs, or how he was elected. That I am a former consul is beyond dispute.

11 To show you what sort of consul he professed himself to be, he attacked my consulship. That consulship was mine in name, senators, but yours in reality. What did I resolve, accomplish or undertake except by this body’s counsel, authority and judgment? And you, wise man as well as eloquent, dared to criticize these deeds before the very men whose counsel and wisdom directed them? Who besides you and Publius Clodius has ever been found to condemn my consulship? His fate awaits you, as it awaited Gaius Curio: you have in your own home what proved fatal to them both.

12 Marcus Antony disapproves of my consulship. But Publius Servilius approved it—to name first the most recently deceased of the former consuls of that time. Quintus Catulus approved it, whose authority will always live in this republic; so did both Luculluses, Marcus Crassus, Quintus Hortensius, Gaius Curio, Gaius Piso, Manius Glabrio, Manius Lepidus, Lucius Volcatius, Gaius Figulus, Decimus Silanus and Lucius Murena, who were then consuls-elect. Marcus Cato shared their approval; among the many things he foresaw as he left this life was the advantage of never seeing you consul. Above all, Gnaeus Pompey approved my consulship. When he first met me on his return from Syria, he embraced and congratulated me, saying that it was thanks to me that he would see his country again. But why name individuals? The senate, in its fullest attendance, approved it so completely that no one failed to thank me as a father, or to acknowledge that he owed me his life, his fortune, his children and the republic.

13 But since the republic has been bereaved of the many great men I have named, let us turn to the living: the two former consuls who alone remain. Lucius Cotta, a man of the highest ability and judgment, proposed a public thanksgiving in the most generous terms for the very achievements you condemn. The former consuls I have just named, and the entire senate, assented. Since this city’s foundation, no civilian before me had received that honor.

14 And Lucius Caesar, your uncle—with what eloquence, what firmness, what gravity he pronounced judgment on his sister’s husband, your stepfather! You ought to have made him the guide and teacher of all your counsels and your whole life; instead, you preferred to resemble your stepfather rather than your uncle. I, unrelated to him, followed his advice as consul. Have you, his sister’s son, ever consulted him at all about the republic? Whom, then, does he consult? Immortal gods! Men whose birthdays, apparently, we too must hear about. Antony has not come down to the Forum today.

15 Why? He is giving a birthday feast in his gardens. For whom? I shall name no one. Imagine some Phormio, some Gnatho, even some Ballio. What disgraceful filth in a man! What unbearable shamelessness, worthlessness and lust! With a senator of the highest rank, an exceptional citizen, so closely related to you, do you consult him about nothing in public affairs, but consult men who have no property of their own and exhaust yours? Evidently your consulship saves the state, while mine destroyed it. Have you lost shame together with chastity so completely that you dared say this in the very temple where I consulted the senate that once, in its greatness, presided over the world, while you have stationed the most desperate men with swords?

16 You even dared—and what would you not dare?—to say that in my consulship the Capitoline slope was crowded with armed slaves. I was coercing the senate, I suppose, to obtain those wicked decrees! Wretched man: whether you know nothing of these events—for you know nothing good—or know them and still speak so shamelessly before such men! What Roman knight, what young noble except you, what person of any rank who remembered he was a citizen was not on the Capitoline slope while the senate met in this temple? Who did not enroll? Yet the clerks could not keep pace, nor could the registers hold their names.

17 For when criminals confessed their plot to murder their country—compelled by their accomplices’ testimony, by their own handwriting, by the almost speaking voice of their letters—to an agreement to burn the city, slaughter its citizens, devastate Italy and destroy the republic, who would not rise to defend the common safety? Especially when the senate and Roman people had a leader such as, if they had one now, would have brought the same fate upon you that befell those men. He says I refused him his stepfather’s body for burial. Not even Publius Clodius ever said that. Although I had good reason to be his enemy, I grieve that you have now surpassed him in every vice.

18 How did it enter your head to remind us that you were brought up in Publius Lentulus’s house? Were you afraid we might think nature alone could have made you so wicked, without the help of training? So senseless were you that throughout your speech you contradicted yourself: not merely saying things that failed to fit together, but things utterly disconnected and opposed. Your quarrel was less with me than with yourself. You admitted your stepfather’s part in that enormous crime, yet complained that he was punished. Thus you praised what was mine alone and condemned what belonged entirely to the senate. The arrest of the guilty was my doing; their punishment was the senate’s. Our eloquent speaker does not understand that he praises the man he is attacking and condemns the men he is addressing.

19 Then consider what audacity it took—I should not say audacity, for he likes to be called audacious, but stupidity, the quality he least wants named and in which he surpasses everyone—to mention the Capitoline slope while armed men move among our benches; while here, immortal gods, in this very sanctuary of Concord, where during my consulship the saving resolutions were pronounced that have kept us alive to this day, men stand posted with swords! Accuse the senate; accuse the equestrian order, which then stood united with it; accuse every rank, every citizen, provided you admit that this body is at this very moment hemmed in by Ituraeans. It is not daring that lets you speak with such shamelessness: you cannot see how completely the facts contradict you. You understand nothing at all. What could be madder than to take up arms yourself to ruin the republic and reproach another for taking them up to save it?

20 At one point you even tried to be witty. Good gods, how ill it suited you! And there you are not entirely blameless: you might have picked up a little wit from your mime-actress wife. “Let arms yield to the toga.” Well? Did they not yield then? But afterward the toga yielded to your arms. Let us ask which was better: that criminals’ weapons should yield to the Roman people’s liberty, or that our liberty should yield to your weapons. I shall answer no further about my verses. I shall say only this: you understand neither them nor literature of any kind. I have never failed the republic or my friends; yet in every kind of writing, by work done in spare hours, I have contrived that my sleepless labor and my books should bring some benefit to the young and some glory to the Roman name. But this is not the time for that. Let us turn to greater matters.

21 You attributed Publius Clodius’s killing to my counsel. What would people have thought if he had been killed when you pursued him with a sword in the Forum before the Roman people’s eyes? You would have finished the business had he not flung himself up a bookseller’s stairs and blocked them to stop your attack. I confess I wished you success then; even you do not say I advised you. But with Milo I could not even have wished him success beforehand: he finished the business before anyone suspected he would attempt it. Yet I advised him, you say. As though Milo lacked the spirit to serve the republic without someone prompting him! But I rejoiced. Well? Amid the entire city’s rejoicing, was I alone supposed to mourn?

22 There was, however, an inquiry into Clodius’s death, though not a wisely constituted one. What need was there for a new law to investigate a man who had killed another, when existing laws already provided an inquiry? Still, an inquiry was held. And the charge no one brought against me while the case was being tried has waited all these years for you to bring it?

23 As for what you dared to say at such length—that my efforts broke Pompey’s friendship with Caesar and that the civil war therefore began through my fault—your error lay not in the whole story, but in its most important element: the dates. During the consulship of Marcus Bibulus, an outstanding citizen, I left nothing undone, so far as effort and exertion could achieve it, to draw Pompey away from his alliance with Caesar. Caesar was more successful: he broke Pompey’s friendship with me. But once Pompey had surrendered himself wholly to Caesar, why should I have tried to tear him away? To hope for it would have been foolish; to urge it, presumptuous.

24 There were, however, two occasions when I urged Pompey to oppose Caesar. Condemn them if you can. First, I urged him not to extend Caesar’s command for five years; second, not to allow a measure permitting Caesar’s candidacy to be considered in his absence. Had I persuaded him of either, we would never have fallen into these miseries. And when Pompey had already transferred all his own power and the Roman people’s to Caesar, when he began too late to perceive what I had foreseen long before, and I saw an impious war being brought upon our country, I never ceased to urge peace, harmony and a settlement. Many know my words: “Gnaeus Pompey, if only you had either never entered an alliance with Gaius Caesar, or never broken it!” The first course would have shown your firmness, the second your prudence. Such, Marcus Antony, was always my counsel concerning Pompey and the republic. Had it prevailed, the republic would stand, and you would have fallen under the weight of your own disgraces, poverty and infamy.

25 But those are old matters. Here is a recent one: Caesar was killed on my advice. I begin to fear, senators, the most shameful suspicion—that I have planted a collusive accuser to adorn me not merely with my own honors, but to heap upon me those belonging to others. Was my name ever heard among those who shared in that supremely glorious act? And whose name among those who took part was concealed? Concealed, do I say? Whose was not immediately made public? I would sooner believe that some who knew nothing of it boasted of belonging to that company than that anyone who did belong wished to hide it.

26 How likely is it, moreover, that among so many men, some obscure, some young, and none concealing their names, mine could have remained hidden? If those who performed the deed needed men to urge them to liberate their country, was I to spur on the Brutuses? Both saw the image of Lucius Brutus every day, and one saw Ahala’s too. Were men with such ancestors to seek counsel from strangers rather than their own family, abroad rather than at home? And Gaius Cassius, born into a family that could endure neither tyranny nor even anyone’s undue influence—he needed my prompting, I suppose! Even without those illustrious men, he would have accomplished the deed in Cilicia at the mouth of the Cydnus, had Caesar brought his ships to the bank he had intended rather than the opposite one.

27 Was Gnaeus Domitius roused to recover liberty not by the death of his most illustrious father, not by his uncle’s death, not by the stripping away of his rank, but by my influence? Or did I persuade Gaius Trebonius? I would not even have dared advise him. The republic owes him all the greater gratitude for placing the Roman people’s liberty above one man’s friendship, choosing to cast down tyranny instead of taking a share in it. And Lucius Tillius Cimber—was he acting on my authority? I was more surprised that he had done the deed than inclined beforehand to think he would. My surprise was precisely that he had forgotten favors received and remembered his country. And the two Serviliuses—shall I call them Cascas or Ahalas?—do you think my influence stirred them too, rather than love of the republic? It would take too long to go through the rest. That there were so many was a splendid thing for the republic, and glorious for the men themselves.

28 Remember how this acute fellow proved his case against me. “When Caesar had been killed,” he says, “Brutus at once lifted his bloody dagger high, called out Cicero by name, and congratulated him on liberty regained.” Why me above all? Because I knew? Consider whether the reason for calling my name was this: having performed a deed like those I had performed, he chose me above all to witness that he had become a rival to my glory.

29 But you, stupidest of men, do you not understand that if wishing Caesar killed—the charge you bring against me—is a crime, rejoicing at his death is a crime too? What difference is there between advising a deed and approving it? What does it matter whether I wished it done or am glad it has been done? Is there anyone, then, except those who rejoiced in his kingship, who either did not want it to happen or disapproved once it happened? We are all guilty, therefore. Every honorable man killed Caesar, so far as it lay in him: some lacked a plan, some the courage, some the opportunity. None lacked the will.

30 But attend to the stupidity of the man—or let me say the beast. These were his words: “Brutus, whom I name with respect, held up his bloody dagger and called out ‘Cicero’; from that we must understand that Cicero knew of the plot.” So you call me a criminal, merely suspecting that I suspected something; but the man who carried a dripping dagger before him, you name with respect? Very well. Let that stupidity pass in your words: how much greater it is in your actions and judgments! Decide at last, consul, how you wish the case of the Brutuses, Gaius Cassius, Gnaeus Domitius, Gaius Trebonius and the others to stand. Sleep off your drunken stupor, I say, and breathe out its fumes. Must torches be brought to wake you as you slumber over a cause so great? Will you never understand that you must decide whether the men who did that deed are murderers or champions of liberty?

31 Listen a little, then, and for one moment adopt the thoughts of a sober man. I, who admit myself their friend and whom you accuse of being their accomplice, deny that there is any middle ground. I acknowledge that, unless they are liberators of the Roman people and saviors of the republic, they are worse than assassins, worse than murderers, worse even than men who kill their fathers—if indeed killing the father of one’s country is more atrocious than killing one’s own. What do you say, wise and thoughtful man? If they are parricides, why have you always named them with respect, both in this body and before the Roman people? Why, on your motion, was Marcus Brutus exempted from the laws if he should be absent from the city for more than ten days? Why were the Games of Apollo celebrated with extraordinary honor to Marcus Brutus? Why were provinces assigned to Brutus and Cassius, quaestors attached to them, and the number of their lieutenants increased? Yet all this was done through you. They are not murderers, then. It follows that, in your judgment, they are liberators, since no third possibility exists.

32 What is it? Am I confusing you? Perhaps you do not quite understand arguments whose points are set some distance apart. Here, however, is the sum of my conclusion: since you acquitted them of crime, you also judged them worthy of the highest rewards. And so I am now unweaving my own speech. I shall write and tell them that, if anyone happens to ask whether your accusation against me is true, they should deny it to no one. For I fear that their having kept me in the dark would reflect badly on them, while my having refused an invitation would be utterly shameful for me. What deed, holy Jupiter, has ever been done, not merely in this city but in all the world, that was greater, more glorious, more worthy of humanity’s everlasting remembrance? Do you shut me among the leaders of this enterprise as though inside the Trojan horse?

33 I do not object; indeed I thank you, whatever your intention. The deed is so great that the hostility you wish to stir against me cannot weigh beside its glory. Who could be happier than the men you boast of having driven out and banished? What place is so deserted or so uncivilized that, when they approach, it does not seem to speak to them and reach out to welcome them? What people are so rough that, on seeing them, they do not think they have received life’s greatest reward? What forgetful posterity, what ungrateful literature will ever be found that fails to preserve their glory in immortal remembrance? By all means enroll me among such men.

34 But there is one thing I fear you may not approve. Had I been involved, I would have removed not merely the king but kingship from the republic. Had that pen been mine, as people say, believe me, I would have finished not just one act but the whole play. Yet if wishing Caesar killed is a crime, consider, Antony, what will become of you. It is common knowledge that you formed this plan with Gaius Trebonius at Narbo; and it was as a partner in that design that Trebonius, as we witnessed, drew you away during Caesar’s killing. For my part—see how little hostility I show you—I praise you for once having thought well, thank you for not having betrayed the plot, and forgive you for not having acted.

35 That undertaking needed a man. But if someone brings you to trial and invokes Cassius’s famous question, “Who benefited?”, take care that you are not at a loss. The deed did benefit everyone unwilling to be a slave, as you said; but it benefited you above all. You are not merely free of slavery: you are king. At the temple of Ops you freed yourself from an enormous debt. Through those same accounts you scattered incalculable sums. So much was carried to you from Caesar’s house! Your home houses a most profitable workshop for forged memoranda and signatures, a most disgraceful market in lands, towns, exemptions and revenues.

36 What remedy for your destitution and indebtedness was there except Caesar’s death? Something seems to have unsettled you. Are you faintly afraid that this charge may appear to touch you? I release you from that fear: no one will ever believe it. To serve the republic well is not in your nature. The republic has illustrious men to claim as authors of that splendid deed. I say only that you rejoice in it; I do not accuse you of performing it. I have answered the gravest accusations. Now I must answer the rest.

37 You reproached me with Pompey’s camp and that whole period. If my advice and influence had prevailed then, as I have said, you would be destitute today and we would be free; the republic would not have lost so many commanders and armies. I admit that, foreseeing what did come to pass, I felt as much sorrow as every other honorable citizen would have felt had he foreseen it too. I grieved, senators, I grieved that the republic, once saved by your counsels and mine, would soon perish. Nor was I so ignorant or unversed in affairs that a craving for life could break my spirit: if life remained, it would consume me with anguish; if I gave it up, it would release me from every trouble. I wanted those outstanding men, the lights of the republic, to live: so many who had been consuls, so many who had been praetors, so many honorable senators, all the flower of our nobility and youth, and the armies of our finest citizens. Had they lived, however harsh the terms of peace—for I thought any peace with fellow citizens more beneficial than civil war—we would hold the republic today.

38 Had that view prevailed, had the very men whose lives I was protecting not opposed me most fiercely, carried away by hopes of victory, then, to pass over everything else, you certainly would never have remained in this body—or rather, in this city. But my speech, you say, estranged Gnaeus Pompey from me. Did he love anyone more? Did he more often share his conversations or counsels with anyone? It was no small thing that, disagreeing on the republic’s highest interests, we maintained the same intimacy of friendship. I saw what he thought and sought; he saw what I thought and sought. I looked first to our fellow citizens’ safety, so that we might afterward protect their standing; he looked rather to their standing at that moment. Since each had a purpose to pursue, our disagreement was easier to bear.

39 What that exceptional, almost divine man thought of me is known to those who followed him to Paphos after his flight from Pharsalus. He never mentioned me without honor, never without longing for a beloved friend. He admitted that I had seen further, while he had hoped for better things. And you dare attack me in the name of a man whose friend you admit I was, whose property you admit you bought at auction? But let us leave that war, in which you enjoyed far too much good fortune. I shall not even answer about the jokes you say I made in camp. That camp was indeed full of anxiety; yet people, however troubled their circumstances, sometimes relax their spirits, if they are human at all.

40 His condemning both my sorrow and my jokes is strong evidence that I was moderate in both.

You said no inheritances came to me. If only that accusation were true! More of my close and intimate friends would be alive. But how did that enter your head? I have entered in my accounts more than twenty million sesterces received in inheritances. I admit, though, that in this field you are luckier. No one but a friend has made me his heir, so that whatever material benefit there was came mingled with sorrow. But Lucius Rubrius of Casinum, whom you never saw, made you his heir.

41 And consider how he loved you, this man of whom you cannot say whether he was fair or dark. He passes over his brother’s son; he does not even name the son of Quintus Fufius, a most honorable Roman knight and his intimate friend, though he had repeatedly declared that son his heir in public. He makes you his heir, though he had never seen you, or at least had never greeted you. Tell me, if you do not mind: what was Lucius Turselius’s face like? How tall was he? What town and tribe did he belong to? “I know nothing,” you will say, “except what estates he owned.” So he disinherited his brother and made you his heir. Besides these, Antony seized many fortunes belonging to complete strangers, violently expelling the true heirs and taking possession as though he himself were heir.

42 What astonished me most, though, was that you dared mention inheritances when you had not accepted your own father’s.

Was it to assemble these charges, utter madman, that you spent so many days practicing speeches in another man’s villa? Yet your closest associates keep saying that you practice to breathe out the wine, not to sharpen your mind. You even employ a teacher for amusement, a rhetorician chosen by your own vote and that of your drinking companions. You have allowed him to say whatever he likes against you—a witty man, certainly, though you and your friends make easy targets. But see the difference between you and your grandfather: he spoke deliberately and to the point of the case; you speak at a gallop and beside the point.

43 And what a fee that rhetorician received! Listen, senators, listen, and learn the wounds inflicted on the republic. You assigned two thousand iugera of the Leontine plain to the rhetorician Sextus Clodius, tax-free at that, so that at such expense to the Roman people you might learn to understand nothing. Was this too, most shameless man, found in Caesar’s memoranda? But elsewhere I shall speak of the Leontine and Campanian lands, which he tore from the republic and polluted with the most disgraceful occupants. Now that I have sufficiently answered his accusations, I must say something about this reformer and corrector of ours himself. I shall not pour everything out: if we must contest the matter again, as we shall, I want always to come with something new. His multitude of vices and offenses generously supplies me with that opportunity.

44 Shall we examine you, then, from boyhood? I think so: let us start at the beginning. Do you remember going bankrupt before you had put off your boy’s bordered toga? “That was my father’s fault,” you will say. I grant it: a defense full of filial devotion. Yet it was your own audacity that made you sit in the fourteen rows, though the Roscian law assigned bankrupts a particular place, even if their bankruptcy arose from misfortune rather than their own fault. You put on the toga of a man and at once turned it into a woman’s. At first you were a common prostitute, with a fixed price for your disgrace, and no small one. But Curio soon intervened, drew you away from the prostitute’s trade and, as though clothing you in a married woman’s dress, settled you in a fixed and lasting marriage.

45 No boy bought for sexual pleasure was ever so completely in his master’s power as you were in Curio’s. How many times did his father drive you from the house? How many times did he set guards to bar your entrance? Yet with night as your accomplice, lust urging you and payment compelling you, you would lower yourself through the roof. That house could endure such disgraces no longer. Do you realize I am speaking of matters I know intimately? Remember when the elder Curio lay grieving on his bed, while his son threw himself at my feet, in tears, commending you to my care. He begged me to defend him against his father if he demanded the six million sesterces: that, he said, was the amount for which he had stood surety on your behalf. Burning with love, he declared that he would go into exile, unable to bear the pain of separation from you.

46 What troubles I soothed—or rather, removed—from that flourishing family then! I persuaded the father to pay his son’s debts, to use his property to ransom a young man of the highest promise in character and ability, and, exercising a father’s lawful power, to forbid him not only your intimacy but even your company. Remembering that I had done all this, would you have dared provoke me with abuse unless you trusted in those swords we can see?

47 But let us leave sexual outrages and disgraces. There are things I cannot decently say; you have all the more freedom because you have committed things you could not hear from a modest enemy. Look instead at the rest of his life, which I shall sketch rapidly. My mind hastens to what he did in the civil war, amid the republic’s greatest miseries, and to what he does every day. Though you know these matters far better than I, I ask you to listen closely, as you are doing. In such affairs, not only learning the facts but recalling them ought to stir our spirits. Still, let us pass over the middle of the story, I think, lest we reach the ending too late.

48 The man who recounts his kindnesses to me was Clodius’s intimate during his tribunate, the torch behind all his conflagrations. Even then, in Clodius’s own home, he attempted something: he understands perfectly what I mean. Then came the journey to Alexandria, against the senate’s authority, against the republic and religious prohibitions. But he had Gabinius as his commander, with whom anything at all could be done quite properly. And what return was there from that expedition, or what sort of return? From Egypt he went to farthest Gaul before going home. But what home? Everyone then still possessed his own house, and nowhere was there one of yours. A house, do I say? Where on earth could you set foot on anything of your own, except the single property at Misenum, which you held with partners as though it were the mine at Sisapo?

49 You come back from Gaul to stand for the quaestorship. Dare to say you visited your mother before you visited me! I had already received Caesar’s letter asking me to accept satisfaction from you, so I would not even let you speak of reconciliation. Afterward you paid me your respects, and I supported you in your candidacy for the quaestorship. It was then that you tried to kill Publius Clodius in the Forum, with the Roman people’s approval. Though you attempted it of your own accord, not at my prompting, you proclaimed that unless you killed him you could never, in your judgment, make sufficient amends for your injuries to me. I therefore find it extraordinary that you say Milo acted at my prompting, when I never encouraged you, though you offered me the same service unasked. Yet had you persisted, I would have preferred that deed to be credited to your glory rather than to my favor.

50 You became quaestor. Then immediately, without a senatorial decree, without drawing lots, without a law, you ran to Caesar. You thought him the one refuge on earth for poverty, debt, worthlessness and a ruined way of life. When you had filled yourself there with his largesse and your own plunder—if it is filling yourself to plunder what you immediately pour away—you flew back destitute to seek the tribunate, hoping in that office to resemble your husband if you could.

Now listen, I ask you, not to the filthy, unrestrained things he did to himself and his family’s honor, but to the impious, criminal things he did to us and our fortunes—that is, to the whole republic. You will find that his crime was the beginning from which all our evils sprang.

51 For on the first of January, in the consulship of Lucius Lentulus and Gaius Marcellus, when you wished to shore up the tottering, almost collapsing republic, and to protect Gaius Caesar himself if he were in his right mind, Antony set his sold and surrendered tribunate against your counsels. He laid his neck beneath the axe that has killed many for lesser offenses. The senate decreed against you, Marcus Antony—and the senate was still intact, so many of its lights not yet extinguished—what ancestral custom ordained against a domestic enemy. And you dared speak against me before the senators, when this body had judged me the republic’s savior and you its enemy? Mention of that crime of yours has lapsed; remembrance has not been erased. As long as humanity endures, as long as the Roman people’s name survives—and, if you permit it, that will be forever—your deadly veto will be spoken of.

52 What was the senate doing from passion or rashness when you, a young man alone, prevented this entire body from resolving on the republic’s safety? Not once but repeatedly, and you would not even allow the senate’s authority to be discussed with you. What was being sought except that you should not desire the republic’s utter overthrow and destruction? Neither the leading citizens’ entreaties, nor your elders’ warnings, nor the full senate’s efforts could move you from the position you had sold and signed away. Then, after many other remedies had first been tried, necessity dealt you that wound which few before you had received, and none survived:

53 This body then armed the consuls and the other holders of command and office against you. You would not have escaped those arms had you not fled to Caesar’s. You, you, I say, Marcus Antony, first gave Gaius Caesar, eager to throw everything into confusion, a pretext to wage war on his country. What else did he say? What reason did he offer for his utterly mad plan and deed except that Antony’s veto had been disregarded, his tribunician rights abolished, and Antony himself hemmed in by the senate? I pass over how false and trivial this was, especially since no one can ever have a just cause for taking up arms against his country. But nothing more about Caesar: you, at least, must admit that your person supplied the pretext for that most ruinous war.

54 Wretched man, if you understand it; more wretched if you do not understand that this is being written down, handed on to memory, never to be forgotten even by the posterity of every future age: that the consuls were driven from Italy; with them Gnaeus Pompey, the glory and light of the Roman people’s empire; all the former consuls whose health allowed them to endure that disaster and flight; praetors, former praetors, tribunes of the people, a great part of the senate, the entire rising generation of young men—in a word, the republic itself, driven out and banished from its own home!

55 As seeds are the source of trees and plants, so you were the seed of that most sorrowful war. You grieve that three armies of the Roman people were destroyed: Antony destroyed them. Those illustrious citizens you mourn—Antony robbed you of them as well. The authority of this body lies broken: Antony broke it. In short, if we reckon rightly, everything we have since witnessed—and what evil have we not witnessed?—must be entered to Antony’s account alone. As Helen was to the Trojans, so he was to this republic: the cause of war, the cause of plague and destruction. The remaining acts of his tribunate matched its beginning. He accomplished everything the senate had successfully prevented from happening while the republic stood safe. Yet recognize the crime within his crime.

56 He was restoring many men ruined by condemnation, but among them there was no mention of his uncle. If he was strict, why not toward everyone? If merciful, why not toward his own family? But I pass over the others. He restored his gambling partner, Licinius Lenticula, convicted of gambling—as though one could not play with a convicted man! No, he meant to discharge, through the favor of a law, what he had lost at play. What grounds for his restoration did you put before the Roman people? That he had been charged in his absence, I suppose? That judgment had been given without a hearing? That no trial had been held under the gambling law? That he had been crushed by force and arms? Or finally, as was said of your uncle, that bribery had corrupted the trial? None of these. But he was a good man, worthy of the republic? That has nothing to do with the issue; still, since conviction counts for nothing, I would excuse you if it were true. A man restores to full rights the most worthless of men, who did not hesitate to gamble even in the Forum and was convicted under the gambling law: is he not proclaiming his own taste as openly as possible?

57 During that same tribunate, when Caesar left for Spain and handed Italy over to Antony to trample on, what a passage along the roads, what a circuit of the towns he made! I know I am speaking of things everyone discusses, and that what I say and am about to say is better known to all who were in Italy then than to me, who was not. Still, I shall mark the details, although my speech cannot possibly match your knowledge. Where on earth has anyone ever heard of such disgrace, such foulness, such dishonor?

58 The tribune of the people rode in a war chariot. Laurel-crowned lictors went before him; among them an actress was carried in an open litter. Respectable townspeople, obliged to come out to meet her, greeted her not by her familiar stage name but as Volumnia. A carriage followed with pimps, his utterly worthless companions. His mother, pushed into the background, followed her filthy son’s mistress as though she were her daughter-in-law. Unhappy woman, what a disastrous fruit of motherhood! He stamped the traces of these disgraces upon every town, prefecture and colony—upon all Italy.

59 Criticizing the rest of his deeds, senators, is indeed a difficult and slippery business. He took part in the war; he gorged himself on the blood of citizens utterly unlike himself; he was fortunate, if there can be any fortune in crime. But since we wish the veterans’ interests protected, although the soldiers’ case is unlike yours—they followed their commander; you sought one out—I shall say nothing about the character of that war, lest you stir their hostility against me. Back to Brundisium you came from Thessaly, a victor with your legions. There you did not kill me. A great kindness! For I admit you could have. Yet no one among those with you then thought I should not be spared.

60 So great is love of country that even your legions held me sacred, remembering that I had saved it. But suppose you gave me what you did not take away, and that I owe you my life because you did not seize it: could your insults have allowed me to go on honoring this kindness as I was honoring it, especially when you saw that you would have to hear these things?

61 You came to Brundisium—straight into the lap and embrace of your little mime actress. What is it? Am I lying? How wretched to be unable to deny what it is utterly shameful to confess! If you felt no shame before the towns of Italy, did you feel none even before the veteran army? What soldier at Brundisium did not see her? Who did not know that she had traveled so many days to offer you her congratulations? Who did not grieve to discover so late what a worthless man he had followed?

62 Then another dash through Italy, with the same mime actress for company; the cruel, pitiful planting of soldiers in the towns; in Rome, the foul plunder of gold, silver, and above all wine. To this was added his appointment as master of the horse, through the favor of Caesar’s friends, without Caesar’s knowledge, while Caesar was at Alexandria. Then he thought himself entitled to live with Hippias and hand over the horses that yielded revenue to Sergius the mime. Then he chose for his residence not the house he now so badly keeps up, but that of Marcus Piso. Why should I bring forward his decrees? Why his robberies? Why the estates whose possession he granted? Why those he seized? Poverty drove him; he had nowhere to turn. The great inheritance from Lucius Rubrius had not yet come to him, nor the one from Lucius Turselius. Nor had he yet installed himself as sudden heir to Gnaeus Pompey and the many others who were absent. He was compelled to live as brigands do: his possessions could extend no further than his plunder.

63 But let us pass over these exploits of his more muscular wickedness and speak instead of the vilest kind of frivolity. With that throat, those flanks, that gladiator’s strength throughout your body, you had drained so much wine at Hippias’s wedding that the next day you had to vomit in full view of the Roman people. A spectacle foul not only to see but even to hear of! If this had happened to you at dinner, over those monstrous drinking cups of yours, who would not have thought it disgraceful? But at an assembly of the Roman people, conducting public business as master of the horse—a man for whom even a belch would have been shameful—you vomited lumps of food reeking of wine into your lap and over the whole tribunal. But he admits himself that these belong among his filthy deeds. Let us come to his brilliant ones.

64 Caesar returned from Alexandria a fortunate man, at least in his own eyes. In my judgment, no man whose fortune is disastrous to the republic can be fortunate himself. The auction spear was planted before the temple of Jupiter Stator, and the property of Gnaeus Pompey—how wretched I am! Though my tears are spent, grief still clings, rooted in my heart—the property, I say, of Gnaeus Pompey the Great was subjected to the auctioneer’s most bitter cry. In this one matter the country forgot its slavery and groaned. Though its spirit was enslaved, though fear held everything in its grip, that groan of the Roman people was free. Everyone waited to see who could be so impious, so mad, so much the enemy of gods and men, as to dare approach that criminal sale. No one was found but Antony, though so many stood around that spear who would have dared anything else. One man was found to dare what the audacity of all the rest had shrunk from and dreaded.

65 Has such stupor overwhelmed you—or, to speak more truly, such madness—that, first, although you are a buyer of confiscated estates, born to the rank you were, and second, although the estate you bought was Pompey’s, you do not know that the Roman people curses you, that it abhors you, that all the gods, all human beings, are and will remain your enemies? And with what instant insolence that glutton swooped upon the fortune of the man whose valor had made the Roman people more formidable to foreign nations, whose justice had made it dearer! Having suddenly gorged himself on that man’s wealth, he leaped for joy like a character in a mime: penniless a moment ago, rich in an instant. But, as some poet says, “What is ill-gotten is ill-spent.”

66 It is incredible, something like a prodigy, how he poured out so much in so few—not months, I say, but days. There was an immense store of wine, a vast weight of the finest silver, costly clothing, and a great abundance of splendid furniture in many places—not the furnishings of a luxurious man, certainly, but of a wealthy one. Within a few days none of it remained. What Charybdis was ever so ravenous?

67 Charybdis, do I say? If she ever existed, she was a single creature. By the god of good faith, Ocean itself could hardly, I think, have swallowed so quickly so many things, so widely scattered and kept in places so far apart. Nothing was locked up, nothing sealed, nothing entered in an inventory. Whole wine cellars were given away to the most worthless men; male mimes snatched one thing, female mimes another. The house was crammed with gamblers, full of drunkards; drinking went on all day, and in several places at once. His gambling deficits, too, were often made good—for this fellow did not always win. You could have seen beds in slaves’ rooms spread with Gnaeus Pompey’s purple coverlets. Stop wondering, then, that all this was consumed so quickly. Such depravity could swiftly have devoured not only one man’s estate, however ample, as that one was, but cities and kingdoms. And this same man took the house and gardens too.

68 What monstrous audacity! Did you dare even to enter that house—you, to cross that most sacred threshold, you, to show your utterly polluted face to the household gods of that home? For a time no one could look at that house, no one could pass it without tears. Are you not ashamed to have lodged there so long? However little understanding you have, nothing in it can give you pleasure. When you looked at those ships’ beaks in the entrance hall, did you think you were entering your own house? It cannot be. Mindless and senseless as you are, you still know yourself, your belongings, and your people. Indeed, I do not believe your mind can ever be at rest, waking or asleep. Violent and raving as you are, the apparition of that incomparable man must rise before you, startle you from sleep in terror, and often drive you mad even while you are awake.

69 For my part, I pity the very walls and roof. What had that house ever seen but chastity? What but conduct in keeping with the finest traditions and the strictest discipline? For that man, senators, as you know, was illustrious abroad and admirable at home, no more deserving of praise for his public achievements than for the ordering of his household. In his dwelling there are stables instead of bedrooms, taverns instead of private chambers. Though now Antony denies it. Do not ask: he has reformed. He ordered that woman of his to take her belongings, took away her keys as the Twelve Tables prescribe, and drove her out. What a distinguished citizen, what an exemplary man! In his whole life he has done nothing more honorable than divorce a mime actress.

70 And how often he mouths the words “both consul and Antony”! That is to say, “both consul and utterly shameless,” “both consul and the most worthless of men.” What else does “Antony” mean? If the name signified distinction, your grandfather, I imagine, would sometimes have called himself “both consul and Antony.” He never did. My colleague, your uncle, would have said it too—unless you alone are an Antony. But I leave aside those offenses which do not belong specifically to the cause with which you ravaged the republic. I return to your cause itself: the civil war, which was born, kindled, and undertaken through your efforts.

71 Yet that war found you absent, partly through cowardice and partly through lust. You had tasted your fellow citizens’ blood—or rather, drained it. You had fought in the front rank at Pharsalus. You had killed Lucius Domitius, a man of the highest distinction and noblest birth, and had hunted down and most cruelly slaughtered many others who escaped from the battle, men whom Caesar might perhaps have spared, as he spared some. After exploits so great and of such a kind, why did you not follow Caesar to Africa, especially when so much of the war remained? And so, what place did you hold with Caesar himself after his return from Africa? What was your standing? You had been his quaestor when he was a general, his master of the horse when he was dictator, a prime mover in his war, a promoter of his cruelty, a partner in his plunder, and, as you yourself used to say, his son in his will. You were called upon to pay the money you owed for the house, for the gardens, for the confiscated estate.

72 At first you answered with outright defiance and—to avoid seeming wholly against you—what you said was almost fair and just: “Gaius Caesar demands money from me? Why not I from him instead? Did he win without me? He could not even have done so. I brought him the pretext for civil war; I proposed ruinous laws; I took up arms against the consuls and generals of the Roman people, against the senate and the Roman people, against our ancestral gods, our altars and hearths, against our country. Did he win for himself alone? When men share the crime, why should they not share the spoils?” You were demanding your rights. But what did that matter?

73 He had the greater power. And so, brushing aside your bluster, he sent soldiers both to you and to your sureties. Suddenly you produced that splendid notice of sale. How people laughed at so long a notice, so many properties of such varied kinds, among which, apart from a share of the estate at Misenum, there was nothing the man holding the auction could call his own! And what a pitiful sight the auction was: a few of Pompey’s clothes, and those stained; some dented silver vessels of his; slaves in squalor. It grieved us that anything survived of those remnants for us to see.

74 Yet the heirs of Lucius Rubrius stopped even this auction by a decree of Caesar’s. The scoundrel was caught fast; he had nowhere to turn. Indeed, at this very time an assassin sent by him was said to have been caught in Caesar’s house with a dagger. Caesar complained of it in the senate, openly denouncing you. Caesar set out for Spain, allowing you a few more days to pay because you had no money. Even then you did not follow. So fine a gladiator, and taking the wooden sword of discharge so soon? Is anyone, then, to be frightened of a man who has shown such cowardice in his own cause—that is, where his own fortunes were at stake?

75 At long last he did set out for Spain, but, he says, could not reach it safely. How, then, did Dolabella reach it? Either you should never have undertaken that cause, Antony, or, once you had, you should have defended it to the very end. Three times Caesar fought a decisive battle against his fellow citizens, in Thessaly, Africa, and Spain. Dolabella was present at all three battles; in Spain he was even wounded. If you ask my judgment, I wish he had not been there. Still, his original decision deserves censure, his constancy praise. But what are you? To begin with, Gnaeus Pompey’s sons were seeking to regain their country. Granted, their whole party shared that cause. But they were also seeking their ancestral gods, their altars and hearths, the guardian spirit of their own family home—all that you had invaded. When they sought by arms what belonged to them by law—though in circumstances so utterly unjust, what can be just?—still, who had the strongest obligation to fight against Gnaeus Pompey’s sons? Who? You, the buyer of their confiscated estate.

76 Was Dolabella to fight for you in Spain so that you could vomit over your hosts’ tables at Narbo?

And what a return from Narbo! He even asked why I had turned back so suddenly in the middle of my journey. I recently explained the reason for my return, senators. I wished, if I could, to be of service to the republic even before the first of January. As for your question about how I returned: first, in daylight, not in darkness; second, wearing formal shoes and a toga, without Gallic sandals or a traveling cloak. And you even glare at me—angrily, it seems. You would soon make your peace with me if you knew how ashamed I am of the depravity of which you yourself feel no shame. Of all the outrages committed by all men, I have seen nothing more disgraceful, I have heard of nothing more disgraceful. You, who thought yourself a former master of the horse, who were seeking—or rather begging for—the consulship for the coming year, raced about in Gallic sandals and a traveling cloak through the towns and colonies of Gaul, from which we used to seek support for the consulship in the days when men sought it rather than begged for it.

77 But look at the man’s frivolity. He reached Saxa Rubra at about the tenth hour of the day, slipped into a little tavern, and hid there, drinking steadily until evening. Then he hurried to Rome in a two-wheeled carriage and came home with his head wrapped up. “Who are you?” asked the doorkeeper. “A messenger from Marcus.” He was taken at once to the woman for whose sake he had come, and handed her a letter. She read it in tears—for it was a love letter. Its main point was that he would have nothing more to do with that mime actress: he had cast off all his love for her and poured it into this woman instead. As the woman’s tears flowed still more freely, the tenderhearted fellow could bear it no longer: he bared his head and wrapped his arms about her neck. Such a scoundrel! What other name can I give him? I can find no more fitting words. So, for the sake of letting the woman see her catamite, beyond all her hopes, when you suddenly revealed yourself, you threw Rome into a night of terror and Italy into many days of fear?

78 At home, then, you had love for your excuse; outside, you had one still more shameful: to keep Lucius Plancus from auctioning off your sureties’ property. But when a tribune of the people brought you before an assembly, and you answered that you had come on your own business, you even set the people making jokes at your expense. But too much of these trifles: let us come to greater matters.

You went a very long way to meet Gaius Caesar on his return from Spain. You went quickly and came back quickly, so that he might know you were energetic, even if not brave. Somehow or other you became his intimate again. Caesar certainly had this trait: when he knew a man to be utterly ruined by debt and destitute, and knew him also to be worthless and reckless, he welcomed him into his intimacy with the greatest pleasure.

79 With these splendid recommendations, orders were given that you should be proclaimed consul—and with Caesar himself as your colleague. I make no complaint here about Dolabella, who was then urged on, led along, and cheated. Who does not know how treacherously each of you treated Dolabella in that affair? Caesar induced him to stand, then broke his pledged promise and transferred the office to himself; you added your own willing assent to his treachery. The first of January came; we were compelled to attend the senate. Dolabella attacked this fellow at far greater length and with much more preparation than I do now.

80 But what this fellow said in his anger—good gods! First, Caesar had announced that before he left he would have Dolabella made consul—and people deny that he was a king, though he was forever doing and saying things of that sort! But when Caesar had said this, our excellent augur declared that he held a priesthood which gave him power either to obstruct the election through the auspices or to invalidate it, and he insisted that he would do so. Here, to begin with, observe the man’s incredible stupidity.

81 Well? This thing you said you could do by the authority of your priesthood: if you had not been an augur, but had been consul, would you have had less power to do it? Consider whether you might not have done it even more easily. We augurs have only the right to report signs; consuls and the other magistrates also have the right to watch for them. Very well: that was ignorance. We must not demand good sense from a man who is never sober. But look at his shamelessness. Many months in advance he said in the senate that he would either prevent Dolabella’s election through the auspices or do what he in fact did. Can anyone divine what flaw will arise in the auspices unless he has resolved to watch the sky? The law does not permit that during an election; and if a man has watched, he must report it not after the election has been held, but before it is held. Yet his shamelessness is entangled with ignorance: he neither knows what an augur should know nor does what a decent man should do.

82 And recall his consulship from that day down to the Ides of March. Was any attendant ever so humble, so abject? He had no power himself; he begged for everything. Thrusting his head into the back of his colleague’s litter, he asked for favors he could sell. Then came the day of Dolabella’s election. The century that is to vote first is drawn by lot; he keeps quiet. Its vote is announced; he says nothing. The first class is called, then the voting proceeds as usual, then the second class—all done more quickly than I have told it.

83 When the business is finished, our excellent augur—you would have thought him Gaius Laelius—says, “On another day.” What extraordinary shamelessness! What had you seen, what had you perceived, what had you heard? You did not say you had watched the sky, nor do you say so today. So the very flaw occurred which you had already foreseen on the first of January and predicted so far in advance! By Hercules, you falsified the auspices, with grave consequences, I hope, for yourself rather than for the republic. You laid a religious obligation upon the Roman people; as augur you reported an adverse omen against an augur, as consul against a consul. I will say no more, lest I seem to be undermining Dolabella’s acts, which must at some point be referred to our college. But recognize the man’s arrogance and insolence.

84 For as long as you choose, Dolabella is a consul elected under flawed auspices; then again, whenever you choose, he has been elected with the auspices intact. If it means nothing when an augur makes a declaration in the words you used, confess that you were not sober when you said, “On another day.” But if those words have any force, I, an augur, ask my colleague what that force is.

But lest my speech pass over the single most glorious exploit among Marcus Antony’s many achievements, let us come to the Lupercalia. He does not hide it, senators: he is plainly shaken; he sweats, he turns pale. Let him do anything, so long as he does not vomit as he did in the Minucian Portico. What defense can there be for such disgrace? I long to hear it, to see where that great fee paid to his rhetoric teacher has gone, where the fields of Leontini show their worth.

85 Your colleague sat on the rostra, wrapped in a purple toga, on a golden chair, wearing a crown. You mounted the platform, approached the chair—though you were a Lupercal priest, you should have remembered that you were consul—and displayed a diadem. A groan went up throughout the Forum. Where did the diadem come from? You had not picked it up where it lay discarded: you had brought it from home, a crime planned and pondered in advance. You tried to place the diadem on him amid the people’s lamentations; he rejected it amid their applause. You alone, then, criminal that you are, were found to advocate kingship, to wish for a master in the man you had as colleague, and at the same time to test what the Roman people could endure and suffer.

86 You even tried to win pity: you threw yourself at his feet as a suppliant. Asking for what? To be a slave? You should have asked for yourself alone, you who had lived from boyhood in such a way that you would submit to anything and find slavery easy. From us and from the Roman people you certainly had no such commission. What splendid eloquence you displayed, addressing the assembly naked! What could be more shameful? What more foul? What more deserving of every punishment? Are you waiting for us to stab you with goads? If you have any feeling at all, this speech tears you, this speech draws your blood. I fear I may diminish the glory of the greatest men; still, grief drives me to speak. What could be more outrageous than that the man who placed the diadem should live, when everyone admits that the man who rejected it was justly killed?

87 He even ordered this entry to be made in the calendar under the Lupercalia: “Marcus Antony, consul, offered the kingship to Gaius Caesar, dictator for life, at the people’s command; Caesar declined to accept it.” Now, now I am not in the least surprised that you disturb the peace; that you hate not only the city but the light of day; that with the most desperate bandits you drink not only in daylight but on into the next day. For where will you find a foothold in peace? What place can you have under the laws and in the courts, which you did everything in your power to abolish through royal domination? Was Lucius Tarquinius expelled, were Spurius Cassius, Spurius Maelius, and Marcus Manlius killed, so that many centuries later Marcus Antony could do what sacred law forbids and set up a king at Rome?

88 But back to the auspices: Caesar meant to bring them before the senate on the Ides of March. Tell me, what course would you have taken then? I heard that you had come prepared, because you thought I would speak about the falsified auspices, which nonetheless had to be obeyed. The republic’s good fortune swept that day aside. But did Caesar’s death also sweep aside your judgment on the auspices? Yet I have reached a moment which must take precedence over the matters on which my speech had embarked. What flight was yours on that glorious day, what terror, what despair for your life born of the consciousness of your crimes, when, escaping from that flight through the kindness of those who wished you safe if you would be sane, you stole back home!

89 My prophecies of the future—always so true, always in vain! I told those liberators of ours on the Capitol, when they wanted me to go to you and urge you to defend the republic, that as long as you were afraid you would promise anything; the moment you stopped being afraid, you would be yourself again. And so, while the other former consuls went back and forth, I held to my judgment. I saw you neither that day nor the next, and I did not believe any treaty could cement a partnership between the best of citizens and their most savage enemy. On the third day I came to the temple of Tellus, and came unwillingly, with armed men blocking every approach.

90 Antony, what a day you had then! Though you suddenly made yourself my enemy, I still pity you for having begrudged yourself your own good fortune. Immortal gods, what a man you would have been, how great a man, if you could have kept the spirit of that day! We would have peace, secured by the surrender of a noble boy as hostage, the grandson of Marcus Bambalio. But it was fear that made you good—no lasting teacher of duty; what made you wicked was the recklessness that never leaves you when fear is absent. Yet even then, when people thought you excellent—I, for one, disagreed—you presided with utter criminality over the tyrant’s funeral, if funeral it was.

91 That splendid eulogy was yours, that appeal to pity yours, that incitement yours. You, you, I say, lit those torches—both the ones that half-burned his body and those that kindled the blaze which consumed Lucius Bellienus’s house. You unleashed those assaults on our houses by desperate men, most of them slaves, whom we beat back by force of arms. Yet in the days that followed, as though you had wiped away the soot, you procured excellent decrees of the Senate on the Capitol: after the Ides of March, no tablet granting exemption or any other favor was to be posted. You remember what you yourself said about the exiles; you know what you said about exemptions. Best of all, you abolished the very name of dictatorship from public life forever. By that act, indeed, you seemed to have conceived so deep a hatred of kingship that, because of the most recent dictator, you were removing every fear of it. To others the republic seemed settled;

92 to me, not at all: with you at the helm, I feared every kind of shipwreck. Was I mistaken, then? Could he have gone on any longer being unlike himself? Before your eyes, tablets were being posted all over the Capitol. Exemptions were being sold not merely to individuals but to entire peoples; citizenship was being granted no longer person by person but to whole provinces. And so, if these measures stand—which cannot stand while the republic survives—you have lost whole provinces, senators. Not only the revenues but the sovereignty of the Roman people has been diminished by this man’s auctions in his own home.

93 Where are the seven hundred million sesterces entered in the accounts kept in the temple of Ops? Bloodstained money, certainly; yet if it was not returned to its owners, it could have freed us from direct taxation. And you—how did you cease, before the first of April, to owe the forty million sesterces you owed on the Ides of March? Countless purchases passed through your people, and you knew about them. But one outstanding decree was posted on the Capitol, concerning King Deiotarus, a devoted friend of the Roman people. When it appeared, no one, even in the midst of grief, could keep from laughing.

94 For whom did Caesar hate more than Deiotarus? He hated him as much as this order, as the equestrian order, as the people of Massilia, as everyone he knew held the republic of the Roman people dear. So King Deiotarus, who could get nothing fair or favorable from him alive, whether present or absent, became influential with him dead. Caesar had confronted his host in person, calculated the money to be paid, installed one of his own Greek companions in his tetrarchy, and taken away the Armenia granted him by the Senate. What he seized while alive, he restores when dead.

95 But in what language? Now it “seems fair to him,” now “not unfair.” What a marvelous choice of words! Yet never—for I always represented Deiotarus in his absence—did Caesar say that anything we requested on the king’s behalf seemed fair to him. A bond for ten million sesterces was drawn up through the king’s envoys, good men but timid and inexperienced, without consulting us or the king’s other guest-friends. It was drawn up in the women’s quarters, where so many things have been sold and are still for sale. I advise you to consider what you intend to do about that bond. For the king himself, on his own initiative, without any memoranda of Caesar’s, recovered his possessions by his own force of arms as soon as he heard of Caesar’s death.

96 The wise man knew that this had always been the rule of justice: once tyrants were killed, those they had robbed could recover what had been seized. No legal expert, then—not even that fellow who is a legal expert for you alone, the man you use to conduct this business—will say that money is due under that bond for property recovered before the bond was signed. He did not buy it from you: he had possession of his own property before you tried to sell it back to him. He acted like a man. We deserve contempt: we hate the author and uphold his acts.

97 Why should I speak of the endless memoranda, the countless handwritten orders? There are even dealers in them, hawking them openly like advertisements for gladiatorial shows. And so such heaps of coins are being piled up at his house that money is now weighed, not counted. But how blind greed is! A tablet has recently been posted exempting the wealthiest communities of Crete from tribute and stipulating that, after Marcus Brutus’s term as proconsul, Crete is no longer to be a province. Are you in your right mind? Should you not be put in restraints? Could a decree of Caesar’s have freed Crete after Marcus Brutus’s departure, when Crete had nothing to do with Brutus while Caesar was alive? Yet through the sale of this decree—do not imagine it has achieved nothing—you have lost the province of Crete. In short, whatever anyone wished to buy, this man never failed him as a seller.

98 And the law about exiles that you posted—did Caesar enact that? I do not pursue anyone in his misfortune. My complaint is simply this: first, that the return of those whose cases Caesar had judged different has been tainted; next, that I do not know why you deny the same favor to the rest. There are no more than three or four left. Why do men in the same misfortune not enjoy the same mercy from you? Why do you treat them as you treat your uncle? When you proposed a measure for the others, you refused to propose one for him. You even urged him to stand for the censorship, and organized a campaign that provoked both laughter and complaints. But why did you not hold that election?

99 Was it because a tribune of the people reported lightning on the left? When your own interest is at stake, there are no auspices; when your people’s interests are at stake, you become scrupulously religious. What? Did you not abandon him over a seat on the commission of seven as well? Someone else stepped in—you were afraid, I suppose, that you could not refuse him and keep your head. You loaded every insult on a man you ought to have honored as a father, if you had any sense of family duty. You drove out his daughter, your cousin, having sought another marriage and settled on it in advance. That was not enough: you accused a woman of the utmost chastity of sexual misconduct. What more could be added? You were not content with that. On the first of January, in a packed Senate, with your uncle sitting there, you dared to say that your reason for hating Dolabella was that you had discovered he had tried to seduce your cousin and wife. Who can judge whether you were more shameless in saying this in the Senate, more vicious in saying it against Dolabella, more filthy in saying it within her father’s hearing, or more cruel in speaking so foully, so heartlessly, against that unhappy woman?

100 But let us return to the handwritten orders. What inquiry did you make into them? The Senate ratified Caesar’s acts for the sake of peace—the things Caesar had actually done, not the things Antony said Caesar had done. Where do these documents come pouring out from? On whose authority are they produced? If they are false, why are they approved? If genuine, why are they sold? The decision was that, beginning on the first of June, you should examine Caesar’s acts with an advisory council. What council was there? Whom did you ever summon? What first of June did you wait for? Was it the one when, after touring the veterans’ colonies, you returned surrounded by armed men?

What a splendid whirlwind tour you made in April and May, when you even tried to plant a colony at Capua! How you escaped from there is known to us—or rather, how you almost did not escape.

101 And that is the city you threaten! If only you would try, so that at last we could strike out that “almost”! But what a distinguished journey of yours! Why should I bring up your lavish luncheons, your raving drunkenness? Those are your losses; these are ours. The Campanian land—even when it was withdrawn from the revenue rolls to be given to soldiers, we thought a grievous wound was being dealt to the republic—you were dividing it among your table companions and gambling partners. I mean, senators, that actors and actresses in farces were settled on Campanian land. What complaint can I now make about the territory of Leontini? For those two tracts, Campanian and Leontine, were once reckoned the grain-bearing, fruitful farmlands in the Roman people’s inheritance. Three thousand iugera for your doctor: what if he had cured you? Two thousand for your teacher of rhetoric: what if he had been able to make you eloquent?

102 But let us return to your journey through Italy. You planted a colony at Casilinum, where Caesar had already planted one. You consulted me by letter about Capua, admittedly, but I would have given the same answer about Casilinum: could you lawfully plant a new colony where a colony already existed? I said that where a colony had been founded under the auspices, no new colony could lawfully be planted so long as the first remained intact. New colonists could be enrolled: that was my written answer. But you, swollen with arrogance and overturning the entire law of the auspices, planted a colony at Casilinum, where one had been planted only a few years before, so that you could raise the standard and drive the plow around the boundary. Indeed, with its plowshare you almost scraped the gate of Capua, diminishing the territory of that flourishing colony.

103 From this assault on religious law you swoop down on the estate at Casinum belonging to Marcus Varro, a man of the greatest integrity and honor. By what right? With what face? “By the same right,” you will say, “as I entered the estates of the heirs of Lucius Rubrius and Lucius Turselius, and countless other properties.” If you bought at auction, let the auction stand; let the accounts stand—Caesar’s, though, not yours: the accounts under which you owed money, not those by which you cleared your own debts. But who says that Varro’s estate at Casinum was sold? Who saw the auction spear for that sale? Who heard it proclaimed by the auctioneer? You claim you sent an agent to buy it from Caesar in Alexandria. It was too much, of course, to wait for Caesar himself.

104 But who ever heard that anything at all had been taken from Varro’s property? And no one had more people concerned for his safety. What if Caesar even wrote to you, telling you to give it back? What words can do justice to such shamelessness? Put away for a moment those swords we see. You will soon understand that Caesar’s auction gives one sort of claim, your own brazenness and recklessness quite another. For it is not only the owner who will keep you out of that house: any friend, neighbor, guest-friend, or agent will do it. And how many days you spent in that villa in the most disgraceful revelry! From the third hour of the day there was drinking, gambling, vomiting. Poor house itself, held by so different a master—though how was he its master?—but still, held by one so different! Marcus Varro meant it to be a retreat for his studies, not his lusts.

105 What conversations there used to be in that villa! What thoughts, what writings! The laws of the Roman people, the records of our ancestors, the whole range of wisdom and learning. But with you as tenant—for owner you were not—everything rang with drunken shouting, the floors swam with wine, the walls were soaked; freeborn boys mingled with boys for hire, prostitutes with married women. People came to pay their respects from Casinum, Aquinum, Interamna. No one was admitted. Quite rightly: in so disgraceful a man the insignia of high office were losing all distinction.

106 As he left there for Rome and approached Aquinum, a very large crowd came out to meet him, for it is a populous town. He, however, passed through the town borne like a dead man in a closed litter. What folly, people of Aquinum! At least your homes stood along his road. What of the people of Anagnia? They were off the road, yet came down to greet this fellow as if he were a consul. Incredible to relate, but everyone agreed that not one greeting was returned—especially remarkable since he had two men from Anagnia with him, Mustela and Laco, one the leader of the swords, the other of the drinking cups.

107 Why should I recount those threats and insults with which he assailed the Sidicini and harassed the people of Puteoli because they had adopted Gaius Cassius and the Brutuses as their patrons? They did so with great enthusiasm, considered judgment, goodwill, and affection—not by force of arms, as people adopted you and Basilus, and others like you, whom no one would want as clients, much less want to be their client. Meanwhile, while you were away, what a day your colleague had when he tore down that funeral monument in the Forum which you used to worship! When the news reached you, you collapsed: everyone who was with you agreed on that. What happened afterward I do not know—fear and armed force prevailed, I suppose. At any rate, you dragged your colleague down from heaven and made him, not yet like yourself, but certainly unlike himself.

108 And then, what a return to Rome! What turmoil throughout the city! We remembered Cinna’s excessive power, then Sulla’s domination; only recently we had seen Caesar reigning. There may have been swords, but they were concealed, and not so many. But this—what barbarism, and on what a scale! Men follow in a square battle formation with swords; we see litterloads of shields being carried. And by now, senators, these things are so entrenched that habit has hardened us to them. On the first of June, when we intended to come to the Senate as agreed, we were suddenly terrified into scattering.

109 But this man, who had no need of a Senate, missed no one. Indeed, he rejoiced at our departure, and at once accomplished those astonishing crimes. The man who had defended Caesar’s handwritten orders for his own profit overturned Caesar’s laws—and excellent laws they were—to shake the republic. He extended the number of years assigned to provincial commands. Though he ought to have been the defender of Caesar’s acts, this same man annulled those acts in both public and private affairs. In public affairs nothing has more authority than a law; in private affairs nothing is more binding than a will. Some laws he abolished without prior publication; for others he published proposals for their repeal. He invalidated a will, something that has always been upheld even for citizens of the lowest standing. The statues and paintings Caesar left to the people along with his gardens—this man carried some off to Pompey’s gardens, others to Scipio’s villa.

110 And you are devoted to Caesar’s memory? You love him now he is dead? What greater honor had he attained than a sacred couch, a cult image, a pediment, a priest? So, just as Jupiter, Mars, and Quirinus have their priests, is Marcus Antony the priest of the divine Julius? Why, then, do you delay? Why are you not inaugurated? Choose a day; find someone to inaugurate you. We are colleagues: no one will refuse. Detestable man, whether because you are a tyrant’s priest or because you are a dead man’s! Next I ask: do you not know what day today is? Are you unaware that the Roman Games in the Circus reached their fourth day yesterday? And that your own proposal to the people granted a fifth day to Caesar? Why are we not wearing our purple-bordered togas? Why do we allow the honor granted Caesar by your law to be neglected? Or did you allow the rites of thanksgiving to be polluted by adding a day, but refuse to let the sacred couches be polluted? Either abolish the religious observance everywhere or uphold it in every particular.

111 You ask whether I approve of a sacred couch, a pediment, a priest. I approve of none of them. But you, who defend Caesar’s acts—what reason can you give for defending some and neglecting others? Unless, perhaps, you mean to admit that you measure everything by your own profit, not his dignity. Well, what is your answer? I am waiting for your eloquence. I knew your grandfather as a most eloquent man, but you are even more open in your speaking. He never addressed an assembly naked; we have seen your candid, simple-hearted breast. Will you answer these charges? Will you dare open your mouth at all? In this long speech of mine, can you find anything you are confident you can answer? But let us leave the past aside.

112 Defend this one day—this one day, I say, today—this instant in which I am speaking, if you can. Why is the Senate hemmed in by a ring of armed men? Why do your henchmen listen to me with swords in their hands? Why are the doors of Concord’s temple not open? Why do you bring into the Forum, with their arrows, men of the most barbarous of all peoples, the Ituraeans? He says he does it for his own protection. Then is it not better to die a thousand times than to be unable to live in one’s own country without an armed guard? But that is no protection, believe me. You ought to be surrounded by your fellow citizens’ affection and goodwill, not by weapons.

113 The Roman people will tear those weapons from you and wrench them away—may we survive to see it! But however you treat us, believe me, you cannot last long while you pursue those designs. Indeed, that wife of yours, so free from greed—I describe her without insult—has owed the Roman people a third installment for far too long. The Roman people have men to whom they can entrust the helm of state. Wherever in the world those men may be, there lies the republic’s entire defense—or rather, the republic itself, which so far has only avenged itself, not yet recovered itself. The republic certainly has young men of the highest birth ready to defend it. Let them withdraw as far as they please in the interests of peace: the republic will call them back. The name of peace is sweet, and peace itself brings safety; but there is all the difference in the world between peace and slavery. Peace is freedom undisturbed; slavery is the worst of all evils, to be repelled not only by war but even by death.

114 And if those liberators of ours have removed themselves from our sight, they have still left us the example of their deed. They did what no one had done. Brutus pursued Tarquin in war, a man who had been king when kingship was lawful at Rome. For suspected designs on kingship, Spurius Cassius, Spurius Maelius and Marcus Manlius were put to death. These men were the first to attack with swords not someone aspiring to reign, but someone reigning. Their deed is in itself splendid and divine; it also stands before us to be imitated, especially since they have attained a glory that heaven itself seems scarcely able to contain. Though the consciousness of so noble a deed was reward enough in itself, I do not think a mortal should despise immortality.

115 Remember, then, Marcus Antony, the day you abolished the dictatorship. Set before your eyes the joy of the Senate and the Roman people. Compare it with this trafficking of yours and your people’s: then you will understand the distance between honor and profit. But just as some people, through illness and dulled senses, cannot taste the sweetness of food, so the lustful, the greedy, the criminal have no taste for true glory. Yet if glory cannot draw you to act rightly, cannot even fear turn you from the foulest acts? You do not fear the courts. If that is because you are innocent, I commend you; but if it is because you have force at your disposal, do you not understand what a man who has no fear of the courts on those terms ought to fear?

116 If you do not fear brave men and outstanding citizens because weapons keep them from your person, believe me, your own people will not bear with you much longer. And what sort of life is it to fear one’s own people day and night? Unless, of course, you have bound them to you by greater favors than Caesar bestowed on some of the men who killed him—or unless you are in any respect to be compared with him. He had talent, judgment, memory, learning, care, reflection, diligence. He had achieved great things in war, disastrous though they were for the republic. He had contemplated kingship for many years and, through immense labor and immense dangers, accomplished his design. With gladiatorial shows, monuments, public gifts, and banquets he had charmed the unthinking multitude. He had bound his own followers to him with rewards, his opponents with the appearance of mercy. Why say more? Partly through fear, partly through submission, he had already brought a free state into the habit of slavery.

117 I can compare you with him in your lust to rule; in everything else you cannot begin to compare. Yet out of the many evils he branded into the republic, this one good has come: the Roman people have now learned how much to trust each man, to whom to entrust themselves, and against whom to guard. Do you not think of this? Do you not understand that it is enough for brave men to have learned how noble it is in itself to kill a tyrant, how welcome for the service it renders, how glorious in reputation? Or will men who would not endure him endure you?

118 From now on, believe me, men will race one another to this task; they will not wait for an opportunity that is slow to come.

At last, I beg you, Marcus Antony, look back toward the republic. Consider those from whom you were born, not those with whom you live. Treat me as you please; make your peace with the republic. But you must decide for yourself. For my own part, I will declare this: I defended the republic as a young man; I will not abandon it as an old man. I scorned Catiline’s swords; I will not tremble before yours.

119 Indeed, I would gladly offer my own body if my death could bring our country its freedom now—if only the anguish of the Roman people would at last give birth to what it has so long carried! For if, nearly twenty years ago, in this very temple, I declared that death could not come too early for a man who had been consul, with how much more truth shall I now say the same of an old man? For me, senators, death is now even to be desired, after the honors I have attained and the deeds I have accomplished. I have only these two wishes: first, that as I die I may leave the Roman people free—the immortal gods can grant me nothing greater; second, that each person may meet the fate his conduct toward the republic deserves.