VII.  Yes, your consulship, forsooth, is a salutary one for the state, mine a mischievous one.  Have you so entirely lost all shame as well as all chastity, that you could venture to say this in that temple in which I was consulting that senate which formerly in the full enjoyment of its honours presided over the world?  And did you place around it abandoned men armed with swords?  But you have dared besides (what is there which you would not dare?) to say that the Capitoline Hill, when I was consul, was full of armed slaves.  I was offering violence to the senate, I suppose, in order to compel the adoption of those infamous decrees of the senate.  O wretched man, whether those things are not known to you, (for you know nothing that is good,) or whether they are, when you dare to speak so shamelessly before such men!  For what Roman knight was there, what youth of noble birth except you, what man of any rank or class who recollected that he was a citizen, who was not on the Capitoline Hill while the senate was assembled in this temple? who was there, who did not give in his name?  Although there could not be provided checks enough, nor were the books able to contain their names.

In truth, when wicked men, being compelled by the revelations of the accomplices, by their own handwriting, and by what I may almost call the voices of their letters, were confessing that they had planned the parricidal destruction of their country, and that they had agreed to burn the city, to massacre the citizens, to devastate Italy, to destroy the republic; who could have existed without being roused to defend the common safety? especially when the senate and people of Rome had a leader then; and if they had one now like he was then, the same fate would befall you which did overtake them.

He asserts that the body of his stepfather was not allowed burial by me.  But this is an assertion that was never made by Publius Clodius, a man whom, as I was deservedly an enemy of his, I grieve now to see surpassed by you in every sort of vice.  But how could it occur to you to recal to our recollection that you had been educated in the house of Publius Lentulus?  Were you afraid that we might think that you could have turned out as infamous as you are by the mere force of nature, if your natural qualities had not been strengthened by education?

VIII.  But you are so senseless that throughout the whole of your speech you were at variance with yourself; so that you said things which had not only no coherence with each other but which were most inconsistent with and contradictory to one another; so that there was not so much opposition between you and me as there was between you and yourself.  You confessed that your stepfather had been duplicated in that enormous wickedness, yet you complained that he had had punishment inflicted on him.  And by doing so you praised what was peculiarly my achievement, and blamed that which was wholly the act of the senate.  For the