[39]
Nor had I to contend against Saturninus, who was
seeking to satisfy his own indignation with great earnestness of mind,
because he knew that the superintendence of the import of provisions had
been, as an intentional insult, transferred from him while he was quaestor
at Ostia, to the chief man both
of the senate and of the city, Marcus Scaurus. But I had to struggle with
the debauched favourite of wealthy buffoons, with the adulterer of his
sister, with the very high-priest of lewdness, with a poisoner, with a
forger of wills, with an assassin, with a robber; and if—as was
very easy to be done, as ought to have been done, and as many most virtuous
and brave citizens entreated me to do—I had overcome those men by
force and arms, I had no reason to fear that any one would reprove me for
having repelled force by force, or grieve for the death of those abandoned
citizens, or, as I should rather call them, domestic enemies. But these were
the things which had weight with me. That Fury was in the habit of crying
out in all the assemblies that all the things which he was doing to the
prejudice of my safety, he was doing with the approval of Cnaeus Pompeius a
most illustrious man, and both then and now a most intimate friend of mine
as far as he was able to show himself such. Marcus Crassus a most gallant
man with whom I had every imaginable intimacy of friendship, was announced
by that same pest to be most hostile to my fortunes. Caius Caesar, who had
no right to he alienated from me as far as any action of mine could have
deserved such feelings on his part, was constantly stated by the same man in
his daily harangues to be a most determined enemy to my safety.
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.