48.
[125]
I say nothing about Gabinius. Why? Did not Lucius Munius,1 the most fearless and most excellent
of all men, consecrate your property by your own precedent? And if, because
you yourself are concerned, you say that that action ought not to be
ratified, did you in that splendid tribuneship of yours establish laws
which, the moment that they were turned against yourself, you repudiated,
though you made use of them to ruin other people? If that consecration be
legal, then what is there in your property which can be applied to other
than holy uses? Or has a consecration no power, while a dedication draws
with it the sanctions of religion? What then was the meaning of your
summoning that flute-player to be a witness? What was the object of your
brazier? What became of your prayers? What was the meaning of all your
old-fashioned expressions? Did you wish to lie, to deceive, to abuse the
divine reverence due to the immortal gods, in order to strike terror into
men? For if that act is once ratified—I say nothing about
Gabinius,—most certainly your house and whatever else you have is
consecrated to Ceres. But if that
was a joke of yours, what can be more impure than you who have polluted
every sort of religion by lies and adulteries?
[126]
“Well, I confess,” says he,
“that in the case of Gabinius I did behave wickedly.”
You see now that the punishment which was established by you with reference
to another has been turned against yourself. But, O man, O you who are the
very model of every possible crime and wickedness, do you deny with respect
to me that which you admit in the case of Gabinius,—a man the
immodesty of whose childhood, the lust of whose youth, the disgrace and
indigence of whose subsequent life, the open robberies of whose consulship,
we have seen,—a man to whom even calamity itself could not happen
undeservedly? Did do you? that that was a more solemn act which you
performed with one young man alone for your witness, than it would have been
if you had had the whole assembly in that character?
“Oh,” says he, “a dedication is an act which
carries the greatest possible quantity of sanctity with it.”
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