"Orations" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cicero Marcus Tullius)

my speech on this day as a witness to the republic of my everlasting
attachment to its interests.

Since, then, O conscript fathers, I trust that the reason of my
adopting each determination appears praiseworthy to you, before I
begin to speak of the republic, I will make a brief complaint of the
injury which Marcus Antonius did me yesterday, to whom I am friendly,
and I have at all times admitted having received some services from
him which make it my duty to be so.

V. What reason had he then for endeavouring, with such bitter
hostility, to force me into the senate yesterday? Was I the only
person who was absent? Have you not repeatedly had thinner houses than
yesterday? Or was a matter of such importance under discussion, that
it was desirable for even sick men to be brought down? Hannibal, I
suppose, was at the gates, or there was to be a debate about peace
with Pyrrhus, on which occasion it is related that even the great
Appius, old and blind as he was, was brought down to the senate-house.
There was a motion being made about some supplications, a kind of
measure when senators are not usually wanting, for they are under the
compulsion, not of pledges, but of the influence of those men whose
honour is being complimented, and the case is the same when the motion
has reference to a triumph. The consuls are so free from anxiety at
these times, that it is almost entirely free for a senator to absent
himself if he pleases. And as the general custom of our body was well
known to me, and as I was hardly recovered from the fatigue of my
journey, and was vexed with myself, I sent a man to him, out of regard
for my friendship to him, to tell him that I should not be there. But
he, in the hearing of you all, declared that he would come with
masons to my house; this was said with too much passion and very
intemperately. For, for what crime is there such a heavy punishment
appointed as that, that any one should venture to say in this assembly
that he, with the assistance of a lot of common operatives, would pull
down a house which had been built at the public expense in accordance
with a vote of the senate? And who ever employed such compulsion
as the threat of such an injury as to a senator? or what severer
punishment has ever been he himself was unable to perform? As, in
fact, he has failed to perform many promises made to many people. And
a great many more of those promises have been found since his death,
than the number of all the services which he conferred on and did to
people during all the years that he was alive would amount to.

But all those things I do not change, I do not meddle with. Nay, I
defend all his good acts with the greatest earnestness. Would that the
money remained in the temple of Opis! Bloodstained, indeed, it may be,
but still needful at these times, since it is not restored to those to
whom it really belongs.[7] Let that, however, be squandered too, if
it is so written in his acts. Is there anything whatever that can be
called so peculiarly the act of that man who, while clad in the robe
of peace, was yet invested with both civil and military command in