[62]
No law had been passed respecting me. I had not been ordered to appear in
court; I had not been summoned. I was absent. I was even in your own opinion
a citizen with all my rights as such unimpaired, when my house on the
Palatine hill, and my villa in
the district of Tusculum, were
transferred one a-piece to each of the consuls; decrees of the senate were
flying about; marble columns from my house were carried off to the
father-in-law of the consul in the sight of the Roman people; and the consul
who was my neighbour at my villa had not only my stock and the decorations
of my villa, but even my trees transferred to his farm; while the villa
itself was utterly destroyed, not from a desire of plunder, (for what
plunder could there be there?) but out of hatred and cruelty. My house on
the Palatine hill was burnt, not by
accident, but having been set on fire on purpose. The consuls were feasting
and reveling amid the congratulations of the conspirators, while the one
boasted that he had been the favourite of Catiline, and the other that he
was the cousin of Cethegus.
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.