Political Speeches (Oxford World's Classics)

by Cicero

  [47] But let us now pass over his sexual crimes and depravity: there are some things I cannot decently relate. (You have more freedom of speech than I, because you have allowed things to be done to you which no opponent with any sense of modesty would ever bring himself to speak of.) So let me move on to the rest of his career. I shall touch upon this only briefly: I am keen to hurry on to his behaviour in the Civil War—a catastrophic period for our country—and his behaviour today. Now I realize that you, gentlemen, know more about this than I do;* nevertheless, I would ask you to pay me close attention, just as you are doing now. In situations such as this, our spirits should be stirred not only by discovering the facts, but also by recollecting them. Even so, we should, I think, cut short the middle of the story, so as not to be too late in reaching the end.

  [48] Intimate with Clodius during his tribunate he was, this man who now recounts the favours he has done me. He was the torch that set alight all his conflagrations, and even at that time he was up to something inside Clodius’ house—he knows very well what I am talking about.* Then he marched off to Alexandria, in defiance of the senate’s declared wishes, and in defiance of the state and divine prohibition.* But of course Gabinius was his commander, and anything he did with him had to be all right! And what about his return home—what was that like? From Egypt he went straight to Furthest Gaul,* without first going home. But what home am I talking about? In those days everyone had their own home—though you had none.* Home, do I say? Was there anywhere in the world where you could set foot on ground that belonged to you, with the single exception of your place at Misenum—and that you owned jointly with others, like some sort of Sisapo?*

  [49] You returned from Gaul to stand for the quaestorship.* I dare you to say that you called on your mother* before coming to see me. I had received a letter from Caesar asking if I would accept your apologies, and so I did not allow you to say a single word on the subject of reconciliation. After that you paid me attentions, and I kept a lookout for you in your campaign for the quaestorship. It was then that you attempted to kill Publius Clodius in the forum before the approving eyes of the Roman people.* Though you did this on your own initiative, and not on my prompting, you nevertheless declared that, as far as you were concerned, you would never make adequate amends for the wrongs you had done me* unless you actually killed him. I am therefore astonished that you should now say that it was at my prompting that Milo carried out that deed, since when you offered me the same service on your own initiative I did nothing to encourage you. In any case I preferred, should you persevere in your attempts, that the deed be put down to your credit rather than to your desire to do me a favour.

  [50] You were elected quaestor; then all of a sudden, without a decree of the senate, without the lots being drawn, without any legal justification, you ran off to Caesar.* In your view, once you had squandered all you had to live on, that was the only place in the world that could serve as a refuge for your poverty, debt, and profligacy. But once you had stuffed yourself there with Caesar’s largesse and your own plunderings—if you can call it stuffing, when you immediately throw up what you have just swallowed—you flew, destitute, to the tribunate, intending to conduct yourself in that magistracy, if at all possible, just as your husband had.*

  Now please bear with me, gentlemen, while I tell you not of the vile excesses he has perpetrated against his own self and the honour of his family, but of the treacherous crimes he has committed against us and our fortunes—that is to say, against the whole country. What you will discover is that the root of all our troubles sprang from this man’s wickedness.

  [51] On 1 January in the consulship of Lucius Lentulus and Gaius Marcellus,* you were all anxious to shore up the state, tottering as it was and threatening to collapse; and you were willing to pay due consideration to Gaius Caesar himself, so long as he were of sound mind. But then this man here used his tribunate, which he had sold and made over to Caesar, to block your deliberations, and placed his own neck beneath that axe* which has come down on many others for lesser crimes. Against you, Marcus Antonius, the senate passed that decree—a senate still intact, its leading lights not yet put out—that decree which is customarily passed against a civilian enemy, according to the tradition of our ancestors. And have you dared to attack me before the conscript fathers—this same order which judged that I was the saviour of the state,* and you the enemy of the state?

  For some time now, the matter of that crime of yours has not been raised—but its memory is not erased. As long as the human race, as long as the name of the Roman people shall endure—and that will be for ever, if you allow it—so long will that pestilential veto of yours be spoken of. [52] What self-interested action, what over-hasty decision was being taken by the senate when you, a single youth,* prevented that entire order from passing a decree on the national security, not once but again and again, refusing all negotiation over the senate’s expressed wish? What was it trying to do except prevent you from completely overturning and destroying the state? But neither the requests of the leaders of our country, nor the warnings of your elders, nor the representations of a packed senate could bring you to alter a decision which you had put up for sale and knocked down to the highest bidder. Then it was that, after many solutions had been tried, there inevitably fell on you that stroke which fell on few before you,* and from which none had escaped unscathed.* [53] Then it was that the senate put weapons into the hands of the consuls and the other holders of power, military and civil, for use against you—weapons which you would never have escaped, had you not gone over to those of Caesar.

  It was you, yes, you, Marcus Antonius, who first gave Gaius Caesar, desperate as he was to wreak havoc, an excuse to make war on his country. After all, what else did he say, what other excuse did he give for his demented intention and action than that the veto had been disregarded, the tribunician prerogative abolished, and the freedom of Antonius curtailed by the senate? I will not explain how specious, how frivolous these excuses were, especially given that there can never be any just cause whatsoever for a man’s taking up arms against his country. But enough of Caesar: you surely must confess that the cause of that ruinous war was you and you alone. [54]How wretched you must be if you have grasped this! And more wretched still if you have not grasped that this is what is being recorded in history, this is what is being handed down to posterity, and this is what will be the recollection of every generation for the rest of time: that you were the sole cause of the consuls being driven out of Italy, and with them Gnaeus Pompeius, the shining glory of the empire of the Roman people, and every consular whose health allowed him to take part in that disastrous flight, the praetors, the praetorians, the tribunes of the plebs, a large part of the senate, the flower of our young manhood—in a word, the whole of the state driven out and banished from its home! [55] Just as seeds contain the origin of trees and plants, so you were the seed of this most lamentable war. Gentlemen, you grieve that three armies of the Roman people were slaughtered:* it was Antonius who slaughtered them! You mourn the loss of our most illustrious citizens: it was Antonius who robbed you of them! The authority of this order was expunged: it was Antonius who expunged it! And everything that we have seen happen since that time (indeed, what calamity have we not seen?), we shall, if we calculate correctly, attribute to Antonius alone. Just as Helen was to Troy, so was he to this city both the cause of war and the bringer of pestilence and death.

  The rest of his tribunate resembled its beginning. He did everything that the senate, while the state was still intact, had made impossible. But let me tell you of a crime within a crime. [56] He restored many people who had been convicted—but never a word about his own uncle.* If he was being strict, then why not strict towards everyone? If merciful, then why not merciful towards his own family? To say nothing of all the others, he restored his gaming partner Licinius Lenticula,* who had been convicted for gambling—as if it were really the case that the man’s conviction prevented him from gambling
with him! No, the reason he restored him was so that he could pay off his own gambling debts by carrying a law in his friend’s favour. But what explanation did you give the Roman people as to why he should be restored? It was, I imagine, that he had been prosecuted in his absence; that he had been convicted without a defence; that there had been no legally constituted court to try cases of gambling; that he had been a victim of armed violence; or that, as used to be said in your uncle’s case, the jury had been bribed! No, it was none of these. But he was a good man and deserved to be a citizen. That is irrelevant; but since being convicted counts for nothing these days, I would pardon him myself if this were true. But when an utterly disreputable individual, the sort of person who would not hesitate to start gambling even in the forum, is properly convicted under the gambling law, doesn’t the person who restores him reveal his own addiction in the most blatant manner possible?

  [57] In this same tribunate, Caesar, on his departure for Spain, handed Italy over to this man here* for him to trample underfoot. Just think of his progress along the roads, his visitations of towns! I appreciate that I am dealing with matters that are extremely well known and much discussed, and that the events I am and will be talking about are more familiar to those who were in Italy at that time than to me who was not.* Nevertheless, I will pick out particular details, even though what I have to say cannot possibly equate to your first-hand knowledge. After all, was there ever, anywhere on earth, such scandal, such disgrace, and such dishonour? [58] A tribune of the plebs was conveyed in a gig. Lictors wreathed in laurel marched in front of him.* In their midst, an actress* was carried in an open litter; respectable people, coming from the country towns and having inevitably to meet her, addressed her not by her well-known stage name, but as ‘Volumnia’. A coach-load of pimps took up the rear; and his mother, cast out, walked behind her filthy son’s mistress as though that woman were her daughter-in-law. Poor mother, to have such disastrous offspring!* With the imprint of these scandals Antonius stamped on every town, prefecture, and colony, in fact on the whole of Italy.

  [59] To criticize the rest of what he did, conscript fathers, is difficult and dangerous*. He took part in the war.* He drenched himself in the blood of citizens—better men than he. He met with good fortune—if there can be good fortune in crime. But since I am anxious not to upset the veterans—although their position is different from yours (they simply followed their leader, whereas you sought him out)—and do not want you to set them against me, I will say nothing about what sort of war it was.

  From Thessaly you came back to Brundisium with the legions, victorious. And there you did not kill me.* What a huge favour! For I admit you could have done it, even though every single one of the people who were with you was in favour of my being spared. [60] So powerful is the love of one’s country that even to your legions I was inviolable, because they remembered that the country had been saved by me. But let us allow that you granted me what you did not take away from me, and that I owe you my life because you did not deprive me of it: how could I go on acknowledging this favour of yours (as I used to do) once you had insulted me, especially since you were well aware that what you said would prompt this speech from me in return?

  [61] You arrived at Brundisium, then, into the bosom and embrace of your little starlet. What’s wrong? Am I not telling the truth? How distressing it is to be unable to deny what is so disgraceful to admit! If you felt no shame before the people from the country towns, what about the army veterans? Was there a single soldier at Brundisium who did not catch sight of her? A single soldier who was not aware that she had travelled for days on end to bring you her congratulations? A single soldier who was not sickened to discover so late in the day what a worthless man he had followed? [62] After that there was another trip through Italy, with the same actress in attendance. Soldiers were settled on the towns in an appallingly brutal fashion; and at Rome there was a hideous plundering of gold, silver, and especially—wine.

  To crown all this, he was appointed—without Caesar’s knowledge, since Caesar was then at Alexandria, but by the gift of Caesar’s friends—Master of the Horse.* So he thought that gave him the right to live with Hippias, and place hired horses with Sergius the actor.* And he had chosen as his residence not the house which he is now only just holding on to, but that of Marcus Piso.* Why should I mention his decrees, his plunderings, and his seizure and bestowal of the estates of the dead? Poverty compelled him; he had nowhere to turn. He had not yet come into his enormous inheritance from Lucius Rubrius, or the one from Lucius Turselius;* and he had not yet succeeded to the fortunes of Gnaeus Pompeius and the many others who were not at Rome—an instant heir.* No, he had to live as brigands do, owning only what he had managed to rob.

  [63] But let us pass over these examples of a sturdy wickedness, and talk instead of a lightweight kind of worthlessness. You with that gullet of yours, that chest, that gladiator’s physique downed such a quantity of wine at Hippias’ wedding that you were forced to throw up in full view of the Roman people—the next day. What a disgusting sight—disgusting even to hear of! Had this happened to you at dinner, as you knocked back bottle after bottle, is there anyone who would not have thought it outrageous? But at a gathering of the Roman people, while conducting public business, as Master of the Horse, when a mere belch would have been shocking, he vomited, filling his lap and the whole platform with morsels of food stinking of wine! But he himself concedes that this was among his grosser achievements. Let us move on, then, to his greater ones.

  [64] Caesar returned from Alexandria*—blessed by fortune, he reckoned; but to my way of thinking, no man can be fortunate who brings bad luck on his country. A spear was planted in front of the temple of Jupiter Stator,* and the property of Gnaeus Pompeius was subjected—I can hardly continue; I have no tears left, but the pain remains fixed in my heart—the property, I tell you, of Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus was subjected to the pitiless cry of an auctioneer. On that occasion, and on that occasion only, the country forgot its servitude and gasped: though their hearts were enslaved—since fear governed everything—the Roman people let out a gasp that was free. Everyone waited to see who could be so treacherous, so insane, so hostile to the gods and mankind as to dare to bid in that wicked auction. But no one came forward except Antonius—even though there were many others standing around that spear who would have stopped at nothing else: he alone came forward to dare the deed which all the other criminals had recoiled and shrunk from perpetrating.

  [65] Were you so overcome by doziness, then—or, to be more accurate, by insanity—as to purchase confiscated property (a man of your birth!), and the property of Pompeius too, without appreciating that it makes you accursed in the eyes of the Roman people, an object of detestation, and the enemy of all the gods and all mankind now and for ever more? But how presumptuous was the way in which this spendthrift immediately threw himself on the property of the man whose valour caused the name of Rome to fill foreign peoples with terror, but whose fairness caused it to fill them with love!

  So, drenching himself with the wealth of that great man, he danced for joy, like a character from a play, ‘rags to riches’.* But, as some poet* has it: ‘Ill gotten, ill spent.’ [66] It is incredible and weird how he squandered so much property in so few, I will not say months, but days. There was a vast quantity of wine, an enormous weight of the purest silver, valuable textiles, and a large store of elegant and beautiful furniture from numerous houses—the belongings not of a sybarite, but of a man of ample means. Within a few days, it had all gone. [67] What Charybdis* was ever so all-consuming? Charybdis did I say? If that ever existed, it was only a single creature. I call heaven to witness that Ocean itself could scarcely have swallowed up so many things, so widely dispersed in places so far apart, in so short a time. Nothing was secured, nothing was kept under seal, nothing was catalogued. Whole cellars were given away to the most worthless individuals. Actors came and took what they liked, as did actresses. The house was packed with g
amblers, filled with drunks. Drinking went on for days on end, all over the place. Often, too—for he is not always lucky—gambling losses piled up; and in the slaves’ cubicles you could see beds made up with the purple bedspreads of Gnaeus Pompeius. So stop being surprised at how quickly this property was used up. Such prodigality could quickly have devoured not just one man’s patrimony,* however rich it was—and this was rich—but entire cities and kingdoms.

  But the house itself and the property outside the city—[68] monstrous effrontery! Did you dare to enter that house, did you dare to cross its hallowed threshold, did you dare to show your revolting face before its household gods? For a long time no one could set eyes on that house, no one could pass it without weeping: are you not ashamed to have been a lodger in it all this time? After all, in spite of your own ignorance, there is nothing in it that can give you any pleasure. Or when you see those naval trophies* in the forecourt, do you suppose it is your own house that you are entering? That is impossible. You may be without sense or feeling—indeed, you are—but you do at least recognize yourself, your own things, your own people. In fact, I do not believe that you can ever have a moment’s peace, awake or asleep. You may be crazed and violent—you are—but whenever you see a vision of that unique man, you must inevitably start in terror from your sleep, and often be driven insane when awake.

  [69] For my part, I pity the very walls and roof. For what had that house ever witnessed that was not decorous, what that was not in the best traditions and displaying the highest moral standards? As you are well aware, conscript fathers, that great man was as respected at home as he was famous abroad, nor did he merit higher praise for his foreign victories than he did for his domestic conduct. Yet in his house the bedrooms have now been turned into knocking-shops, and the dining rooms into greasy spoons. But Antonius these days denies it. Don’t ask: he’s turned frugal! He has told that woman of his to pack her bags and go, has taken away her keys as the Twelve Tables prescribe,* and has put her out into the street. What an upright citizen, what a worthy man! In the whole of his life, the most honourable thing he has ever done is to have divorced an actress!