38.
[
97]
Why need I mention the countless mass of papers, the innumerable autographs which
have been brought forward? writings of which there are imitators who sell their
forgeries as openly as if they were gladiators playbills. Therefore, there are
now such heaps of money piled up in that man's house, that it is weighed out
instead of being counted.
1 But bow blind is
avarice! Lately, too, a document has been posted up by which the most wealthy
cities of the Cretans are released from tribute; and by which it is ordained
that after the expiration of the consulship of Marcus Brutus,
Crete shall cease to be a province. Are you in
your senses.? Ought you not to be put in confinement? Was it possible for there
really to be a decree of Caesar's exempting
Crete after the departure of Marcus. Brutus, when Brutus had no
connection whatever with
Crete while
Caesar was alive? But by the sale of this decree (that you may not, O conscript
fathers, think it wholly ineffectual) you have lost the province of
Crete. There was nothing in the whole world
which any one wanted to buy that this fellow was not ready to sell.
[
98]
Caesar too, I suppose, made the law about the exiles which you have posted up. I
do not wish to press upon any one in misfortune; I only complain, in the first
place, that the return of those men has had discredit thrown upon it, whose
cause Caesar judged to be different from that of the rest; and in the second
place, I do not know why you do not mete out the same measure to all. For there
can not be more than three or four left. Why do not they who are in similar
misfortune enjoy a similar degree of your mercy? Why do you treat them as you
treated your uncle? about whom you refused to pass a law when you were passing
one about all the rest; and whom at the same time you encouraged to stand for
the censorship, and instigated him to a canvass, which excited the ridicule and
the complaint of every one.
[
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?
2
“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?