acting as body-guards of their queen?  Who can help groaning when he hears Roman knights and senators flattering her like eunuchs?  Who can help weeping when he both hears and sees Antony himself, the man twice consul, often imperator, to whom was committed in common with me the superintendence of the public business, who was entrusted with so many cities, so many legions,—­when he sees that this man has now abandoned all his ancestors’ habits of life, has emulated all alien and barbaric customs, that he pays no honor to us or to the laws or to his fathers’ gods, but worships that wench as if she were some Isis or Selene, calling her children Sun and Moon, and finally himself bearing the title of Osiris and Dionysus, in consequence of which he has bestowed entire islands and some of the continents, as though he were master of the whole earth and the whole sea?  I am sure that this appears marvelous and incredible to you, fellow-soldiers:  therefore you ought to be the more indignant.  For if that is actually so which you do not even believe on hearing it, and if that man in his voluptuary career commits acts at which any one who learns of them must grieve, would you not properly become exceedingly enraged?

[-26-] “Yet at the start I was so devoted to him that I gave him a share of my leadership, married my sister to him, and granted him legions.  Even after this I felt so kindly, so affectionately toward him that I was unwilling to wage war on him because of his insulting my sister, or because he neglected the children she had borne him, or because he preferred the Egyptian woman to her, or because he bestowed upon the former’s children practically all your possessions, or, in fine, for any other reason.  The cause is that, first of all, I did not think it proper to assume the same attitude toward Antony as toward Cleopatra.  I deemed her by the very fact of her foreign birth to be at the outset hostile to his career, but I believed that he, as a citizen, could be corrected.  Later I entertained the hope that if not voluntarily at least reluctantly he might change his mind as a result of the decrees passed against her.  Consequently I did not declare war upon him.  He, however, has looked haughtily and disdainfully upon my efforts and will neither be released, though we would fain release him, nor be pitied though we try to pity him.  He is either unreasonable or mad,—­and this which I have heard I do believe, that he has been bewitched by that accursed female,—­and therefore pays no heed to our kindness or humaneness, but being in slavery to that woman he undertakes in her behalf both war and needless dangers which are both against our interests and against those of his country.  What else, then, is our duty except to fight him back together with Cleopatra? [-27-]Hence let no one call him a Roman but rather an Egyptian, nor Antony but rather Serapio.  Let no one think that he was ever consul or imperator, but only gymnasiarch.  He has himself of his own free will chosen the latter