23. Alas for the disgrace of the
family, I will not say the Calpurnian family, but the Calventian; nor will I
say the disgrace of this city, but of the municipality of Placentia; nor of your father's
family, but of your breeches-wearing1
kinsmen. How, I say, did you come? Who, I will not say of these men, or of
the rest of the citizens, but who, even of your own lieutenants, came to
meet you?
[54]
For Lucius Flaccus, a man most
undeserving of the disgrace of being your lieutenant, and more worthy of
those counsels by which he was united with me in my consulship for the
salvation of the republic, was with me when some one came and said that you
had been seen wandering not far from the gate with your house. I know, too,
that one of the very bravest of men, a man skillful both in war and in civil
business, an intimate friend of mine, Quintus Marcius, one of those
lieutenants whose “Imperator” you had been called in battle, when you were
in reality a long way off, was at the time of your arrival sitting quietly
in his own house.
[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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