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[99]
But why did you not hold that comitia? Was it
because a tribune of the people announced that there had been an ill-omened
flash of lightning seen? When you have any interest of your own to serve, then
auspices are all nothing; but when it is only your friends who are concerned,
then you become scrupulous. What more? Did you not also desert him in the matter
of the septemvirate?1
“Yes, for he interfered with me.” What were you afraid of? I
suppose you were afraid that you would be able to refuse him nothing if he were
restored to the full possession of his rights. You loaded him with every species
of insult, a man whom you ought to have considered in the place of a father to
you, if you had had any piety or natural affection at all, You put away his
daughter, your own cousin, having already looked out and provided yourself
beforehand with another. That was not enough. You accused a most chaste woman of
misconduct. What can go beyond this? Yet you were not content with this. In a
very full senate held on the first of January, while your uncle was present, you
dared to say that this was your reason for hatred of Dolabella, that you had
ascertained that he had committed adultery with your cousin and your wife, Who
can decide whether it was more shameless of you to make such profligate and such
impious statements against that unhappy woman in the senate, or more wicked to
make them against Dolabella, or more scandalous to make them in the presence of
her father, or more cruel to make them at all?
1 The septemviri, at full length septemviri epulones or epulonum, were originally triumviri. They were first created A. C. 198, to attend to the epulum Jovis, and the banquets given in honour of the other gods, which duty had originally belonged to the pontifices. Julius Caesar added three more, but that alteration did not last. They formed a collegium, and were one of the four great religious corporations at Rome with the pontifices, the augures, and the quindecemviri. Smith, Dict. Ant. v. Epulones.
M. Tullius Cicero. The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, literally translated by C. D. Yonge. London. George Bell & Sons. 1903.
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