[18]
He with his mate—whom
however he was desirous to surpass in all vices—dared to issue an
edict that the senate should return to its usual dress contrary to the
resolution which that body itself had passed. What tyrant in any part of
Scythia ever behaved in such a
way as not to permit those men to mourn whom he was loading with misery? You
leave them their grief, you take away the emblems of grief, you take away
their tears not by comforting them but by threatening them. But even if the
conscript fathers had changed their attire not in consequence of any public
resolution, but out of private affection or pity still it would have been an
intolerable stretch of power that your interdict should prohibit them from
doing so; but when the senate in a full house had passed a resolution to
that effect, and all the other orders in the state had already changed their
attire, then you, a consul, dragged out of a dark dirty cookshop, with that
shaved dancing girl of yours, forbade the senate of the Roman people to
mourn for the setting and death of the republic.
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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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