[-18-] “These particulars I shall leave as they stand and return to the point where I started.  That Antony against whom he has inveighed, seeing Caesar exalted over our government, caused him by granting what seemed personal favors to a friend not to put into effect any of the projects that he had in mind.  Nothing so diverts persons from objects which they may attain without caring to secure them righteously, as for those who fear such results to appear to endure the former’s conduct willingly.  These persons in authority have no regard for their own consciousness of guilt, but if they think they have been detected, they are ashamed and afraid:  thereafter they usually take what is said to them as flattery and believe the opposite, and any action which may result from the words as a plot, being suspicious in the midst of their shame.  Antony knew this thoroughly, and first of all he selected the Lupercalia and that procession in order that Caesar in the relaxation of his spirit and the fun of the affair might be rebuked with immunity, and next he selected the Forum and the rostra that his patron might be shamed by the very places.  And he fabricated the commands from the populace, in order that hearing them Caesar might reflect not on what Antony was saying at the time, but on what the Roman people would order a man to say.  How could he have believed that this injunction had really been laid upon any one, when he knew that the people had not voted anything of the kind and did not hear them shouting out.  But it was right for him to hear this in the Roman Forum, where we had often joined in many deliberations for freedom, and beside the rostra from which we had sent forth thousands and thousands of measures in behalf of the democracy, and at the festival of the Lupercalia, in order that he should remember Romulus, and from the mouth of the consul that he might call to mind the deeds of the early consuls, and in the name of the people, that he might ponder the fact that he was undertaking to be tyrant not over Africans or Gauls or Egyptians, but over very Romans.  These words made him turn about; they humiliated him.  And whereas if any one else had offered him the diadem, he might have taken it, he was then stopped short by that speech and felt a shudder of alarm.

“These, then are the deeds of Antony:  he did not uselessly break a leg, in order himself to escape, nor burn off a hand, in order to frighten Porsenna, but by his cleverness and consummate skill he put an end to the tyranny of Caesar better than any spear of Decius and better than the sword of Brutus. [-20-] But you, Cicero, what did you effect in your consulship, not to mention wise and good things, that was not deserving of the greatest punishment?  Did you not throw our city into uproar and party strife when it was quiet and harmonious, and fill the Forum and Capitol with slaves, among others, that you had called to your aid?  Did you not ruin miserably Catiline, who was overanxious for office, but otherwise