[55]
But why do I count up
all the people who did not go forth to meet you? when I say that scarcely
any one did, not even of that most officious body of candidates for office,
though they had been repeatedly warned and requested to do so, both on that
very day, and many days before.
Short gowns were ready for the lictors at the gate, which they took, and laid
aside their military cloaks, and so formed a new crowd to escort their
chief. And in this manner he, the Macedonian “Imperator,” returning home from his mighty and from
his important province, after three years government, entered the city in
such a guise that no obscure peddler ever returned home in a more solitary
condition. And yet this is the very point on which (so ready is he to defend
himself) he finds fault with me. When I said that he had
entered the city by the Caelimontane gate, that ever ready man wanted to lay
me a wager that he had entered by the Esquiline gate; as if I was bound to know, or as if any one
of you had heard, or as if it had anything on earth to do with the matter,
by what gate you had entered, as long as it was not by the triumphal one;
for that is the gate which had previously always been open for the
Macedonian proconsuls. You are the first person ever discovered who, having
been invested with consular authority there, did not triumph on your return
from Macedonia.
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