38.
[101]
Could I have such hardness of mind or such shamelessness of eye, as to be
able in that city, the preserver of which the senate has so often
unanimously decided that I am, to behold my house thrown down, not by my own
private enemy, but by the common foe, and then again built up and placed in
the sight of the whole city, that the weeping of the virtuous citizens might
know no cessation? The house of Spurius Maelius, who aimed at the kingdom,
was razed. What else ensued? The Roman people by the very name of
Aequimaelium, which they gave the place, decided that what had happened to
Maelius was deserved; the punishment inflicted on his folly was approved.
The house of Spurius Cassius was destroyed for the same reason; and on the
same spot was built the temple of Tellus. The house of Marcus Vaccus1 was in
Vaccus's meadows, which was confiscated and destroyed in order that his
crime might be kept alive in people's recollection by the name of the place.
Marcus Manlius, when he had beaten back the attack of the Gauls from the
Capitoline steep, was not content with the renown of his good deed; he was
adjudged to have aimed at regal power, and on that account you see that his
house was pulled down and the place covered with two groves. That therefore
which our ancestors considered the greatest penalty which could be inflicted
on wicked and infamous citizens, am I to undergo and to endure, so as to
appear to posterity not to have been the extinguisher of conspiracy and
wickedness, but its author and leader?
[102]
And will the dignity of the Roman people, O priests, be able to support this
stain of infamy and inconsistency, while the senate live, while you are the
chief man of the public council, if the house of Marcus Tullius Cicero
appears joined with the house of Fulvius Flaccus by the memory of a
punishment publicly inflicted? Marcus Flaccus because he had acted with
Caius Gracchus in a manner opposed to the safety of the republic, was put to
death by the sentence of the senate, and his house was destroyed and
confiscated, and on the spot Quintus Catulus some time after erected a
portico out of the spoils of the Cimbri. But that firebrand and fury of his
country, when, under those great generals Piso and Gabinius, he had taken
the city, and occupied, and was in entire possession of it, destroyed the
memorials of a most illustrious man who was dead, and united my house with
the house of Marcus Flaccus, in order that he, after he had crushed the
senate, might inflict on him whom the conscript fathers had pronounced to be
the saviour of his country, the same punishment which the senate had
inflicted on the destroyer of the constitution.
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1 Vitruvius Vaccus (as Livy calls him) was the leader of the Fundani in the war between Rome and Privernum. He was taken prisoner in Privernum, and put to death. See Livy, lib. viii. c. 19, 20.
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