You have said that no inheritances come to me.  Would that this accusation of yours were a true one; I should have more of my friends and connexions alive.  But how could such a charge ever come into your head?  For I have received more than twenty millions of sesterces in inheritances.  Although in this particular I admit that you have been more fortunate than I. No one has ever made me his heir except he was a friend of mine, in order that my grief of mind for his loss might be accompanied also with some gain, if it was to be considered as such.  But a man whom you never even saw, Lucius Rubrius, of Casinum, made you his heir.  And see now how much he loved you, who, though he did not know whether you were white or black, passed over the son of his brother, Quintus Fufius, a most honourable Roman knight, and most attached to him, whom he had on all occasions openly declared his heir, (he never even names him in his will,) and he makes you his heir whom he had never seen, or at all events had never spoken to.

I wish you would tell me, if it is not too much trouble, what sort of countenance Lucius Turselius was of; what sort of height; from what municipal town he came; and of what tribe he was a member.  “I know nothing,” you will say, “about him, except what farms he had.”  Therefore, he, disinheriting his brother, made you his heir.  And besides these instances, this man has seized on much other property belonging to men wholly unconnected with him, to the exclusion of the legitimate heirs, as if he himself were the heir.  Although the thing that struck me with most astonishment of all was, that you should venture to make mention of inheritances, when you yourself had not received the inheritance of your own father.

XVII.  And was it in order to collect all these arguments, O you most senseless of men, that you spent so many days in practising declamation in another man’s villa?  Although, indeed, (as your most intimate friends usually say,) you are in the habit of declaiming, not for the purpose of whetting your genius, but of working off the effects of wine.  And, indeed, you employ a master to teach you jokes, a man appointed by your own vote and that of your boon companions; a rhetorician, whom you have allowed to say what ever he pleased against you, a thoroughly facetious gentleman; but there are plenty of materials for speaking against you and against your friends.  But just see now what a difference there is between you and your grandfather.  He used with great deliberation to bring forth arguments advantageous to the cause he was advocating; you pour forth in a hurry the sentiments which you have been taught by another.  And what wages have you paid this rhetorician?  Listen, listen, O conscript fathers, and learn the blows which are inflicted on the republic.  You have assigned, O Antonius, two thousand acres[14] which is often translated acre also, of land, in the Leontine district, to Sextus Clodius, the rhetorician,