[22]
Why need I speak of the banquets of those days, why of your joy and
self-congratulation, why of your most intemperate drinking-bouts with your
crew of infamous companions? Who in those days ever saw you sober, who ever
saw you doing any thing which was worthy of a freeman; who, in short, ever
saw you in public at all? while the house of your colleague was resounding
with song and cymbals, and while he himself was dancing naked at banquets;
in which even then, when he was going round in the circle of the dance, he
seemed to have no fear of any revolution of fortune. But this man, who is
not quite so refined in gluttony nor so musical, lay stupefied amid the
reeking orgies of his Greek crew. The banquets celebrated by that fellow at
the time of all this misery of the republic, resembled what is reported of
the feast of the Centaurs and Lapithae; and it is quite impossible to tell
in what sort of debauchery he indulged to the most disgraceful excess.
Will you dare to make mention of your consulship? will you dare to say that
you ever were consul at Rome?
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M. Tullius Cicero. The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, literally translated by C. D. Yonge, B. A. London. George Bell & Sons, York Street, Covent Garden. 1891.
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