8.
[18]
The one reeking with perfume, with curled hair looking with disdain on the
agents of his debaucheries and the old plagues of his youthful age, formerly
when tossed and driven about by the troops1 of usurers lest in that Scyllaean state
of debt he should be dashed up against the Maenian2
column, fled into the harbour of the tribuneship. He despised the Roman
knights, he threatened the senate, he sold himself to the artisans, and
proclaimed openly that they had saved him from being prosecuted for bribery;
and he was used to say, moreover, that he hoped to obtain a province from
them, even though it were against the will of the senate; and if he did not
get a province, he did not think it possible for him to remain in safety.
[19]
The other, O ye good gods! how
horrible was his approach, how savage, how terrible was he to look at! You
would say that you were beholding some one of those bearded
men,—an example of the old empire, an image of antiquity, a prop
of the republic. His garments were rough, made of this purple worn by the
common people you see around us, nearly brown; his hair so rough that at
Capua, in which he, for the
sake of becoming entitled to have an image of himself, was exercising the
authority of a decemvir, it seemed as if he
would require the whole Seplasia3 to make it decent. Why need I
speak of his eyebrow? which at that time did not seem to men to be an
ordinary brow, but a pledge of the safety of the republic. For
such great gravity was in his eye, such a contraction was there of his
forehead, that the whole republic appeared to be resting on that brow, as
the heavens do on Atlas.
[20]
This was the
common conversation of every one: “He is, however, a great and
firm support to the republic; we have some one to oppose to that pollution,
to that mud; I declare solemnly by his mere look he will check the
licentiousness and levity of his colleague; the senate will have some one
this year whom it can follow; good men will not be in want of an adviser and
a leader this year.” And men congratulated me most especially,
because I was likely to have not only a friend and connection, but also a
fearless and dignified consul as an ally against a frantic and audacious
tribune of the people.
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1 The text here is very corrupt. The Latin is “puteali et foeneratorum gregibus inflatus atque perculsus”. The puteal was the puteal Libonis, mentioned in Horace, the enclosure surrounding a well erected by Scribonius Libo to preserve the memory of a chapel which had been struck by lightning, and it was a common place of meeting for usurers.
2 See vol. i. p. 123, note.
3 “Seplasia was the name of the forum at Capua, where the perfumers carried on their trade.”—Nizol.
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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