wickedness of Antonius, but also with his indolence and pride.  Would that Lucius Caesar were in health, that Servius Sulpicius were alive.  This cause would be pleaded much better by these men, than it is now by me single handed.  What I am going to say I say with grief, rather than by way of insult.  We have been deserted—­we have, I say, been deserted, O conscript fathers, by our chiefs.  But, as I have often said before, all those who in a time of such danger have proper and courageous sentiments shall be men of consular rank.  The ambassadors ought to have brought us back courage, they have brought us back fear.  Not, indeed, that they have caused me any fear—­let them have as high an opinion as they please of the man to whom they were sent; from whom they have even brought back commands to us.

VIII.  O ye immortal gods! where are the habits and virtues of our forefathers?  Caius Popillius, in the time of our ancestors, when he had been sent as ambassador to Antiochus the king, and had given him notice, in the words of the senate, to depart from Alexandria, which he was besieging, on the kings seeking to delay giving his answer, drew a line round him where he was standing with his rod, and stated that he should report him to the senate if he did not answer him as to what he intended to do before he moved out of that line which surrounded him.  He did well for he had brought with him the countenance of the senate and the authority of the Roman people, and if a man does not obey that, we are not to receive commands from him in return, but he is to be utterly rejected.  Am I to receive commands from a man who despises the commands of the senate?  Or am I to think that he has anything in common with the senate, who besieges a general of the Roman people in spite of the prohibition of the senate?  But what commands they are!  With what arrogance, with what stupidity, with what insolence are they conceived!  But what made him charge our ambassadors with them when he was sending Cotyla to us, the ornament and bulwark of his friends, a man of aedilitian rank? if, indeed, he really was an aedile at the time when the public slaves flogged him with thongs at a banquet by command of Antonius.

But what modest commands they are!  We must be non-hearted men, O conscript fathers, to deny anything to this man!  “I give up both provinces,” says he, “I disband my army, I am willing to become a private individual.”  For these are his very words.  He seems to be coming to himself.  “I am willing to forget everything, to be reconciled to everybody.”  But what does he add?  “If you give booty and land to my six legions, to my cavalry, and to my praetorian cohort.”  He even demands rewards for those men for whom, if he were to demand pardon, he would be thought the most impudent of men.  He adds further, “Those men to whom the lands have been given which he himself and Dolabella distributed, are to retain them.”  This is the Campanian and Leontine district, both which our ancestors considered a certain resource in times of scarcity.