11.
Great, O senators, is the name, great is the honour, great is the dignity,
great is the majesty of a consul. Your narrow mind, O Piso, your paltry
soul, your spiritless heart, is unable to comprehend that greatness. The
weakness of your intellect cannot grasp it; your inexperience of prosperity
cannot support so dignified, so solemn a character. Seplasia,1 in truth, as I heard said, the
moment that it beheld you, refused to acknowledge you as the consul of
Campania. It had heard of the
Decii, of the Magii, it knew something also about Jubellius Taurea; and if
those men did not display all the moderation which is usually found in our
consuls, at all events there was a pomp about them, there was a
magnificence, there was a gait and behaviour worthy of Seplasia and of
Capua.
[25]
Indeed, if those perfumers had beheld your colleague
Gabinius as their duumviri; 2 they would sooner have acknowledged him.
He at least had carefully-dressed hair, and perfumed fringes of curls, and
anointed and carefully-rouged cheeks, worthy of Capua,—of Capua, I mean, such as it used to be.
For the Capua that now is is full
of most excellent characters, of most gallant men, of most virtuous
citizens, and of men most friendly and devoted to me; not one of whom ever
saw you at Capua clad in your
praetexta without groaning out of regret
for me, by whose counsels they recollected that the whole republic and that
city in particular had been preserved. They had paid me the
honour of a gilded statue; they had adopted me as their especial patron;
they considered that it was owing to me that they were still enjoying their
lives, their fortunes, and their children; they had defended me when I was
present against your piratical attacks, by their decrees, and by their
deputations; and when I was absent they recalled me, when that great man
Cnaeus Pompeius submitted the motion to them, and tore the weapons of your
wickedness out of the body or the republic.
[26]
Were you consul when my house on the
Palatine Hill was set on fire,
not by any accident but by men applying fire brands to it at your
inspiration? Was there ever before any conflagration of any great extent or
importance in the city without the consul coming to bring assistance? But
you at that very time were sitting in the house of your mother in law, close
to my house; you had opened her house to receive the plunder of mine; you
were sitting there not for the purpose of extinguishing, but as the
originator of the fire and you—I may almost say—were
yourself as consul supplying burning firebrands to the Furies of Clodius's
party.
This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.