and those, too, exempt from every kind of tax, for the sake of putting the Roman people to such a vast expense that you might learn to be a fool.  Was this gift, too, O you most audacious of men, found among Caesar’s papers?  But I will take another opportunity to speak about the Leontine and the Campanian district; where he has stolen lands from the republic to pollute them with most infamous owners.  For now, since I have sufficiently replied to all his charges, I must say a little about our corrector and censor himself.  And yet I will not say all I could, in order that if I have often to battle with him I may always come to the contest with fresh arms; and the multitude of his vices and atrocities will easily enable me to do so.

XVIII.  Shall we then examine your conduct from the time when you were a boy?  I think so.  Let us begin at the beginning.  Do you recollect that, while you were still clad in the praetexta, you became a bankrupt?  That was the fault of your father, you will say.  I admit that.  In truth, such a defence is full of filial affection.  But it is peculiarly suited to your own audacity, that you sat among the fourteen rows of the knights, though by the Roscian law there was a place appointed for bankrupts, even if any one had become so.

XIX.  But let us say no more of your profligacy and debauchery.  There are things which it is not possible for me to mention with honour; but you are all the more free for that, inasmuch as you have not scrupled to be an actor in scenes which a modest enemy cannot bring himself to mention.

Mark now, O conscript fathers, the rest of his life, which I will touch upon rapidly.  For my inclination hastens to arrive at those things which he did in the time of the civil war, amid the greatest miseries of the republic, and at those things which he does every day.  And I beg of you, though they are far better known to you than they are to me, still to listen attentively, as you are doing, to my relation of them.  For in such cases as this, it is not the mere knowledge of such actions that ought to excite the mind, but the recollection of them also.  Although we must at once go into the middle of them, lest otherwise we should be too long in coming to the end.

He was very intimate with Clodius at the time of his tribuneship; he, who now enumerates the kindnesses which he did me.  He was the firebrand to handle all conflagrations; and even in his house he attempted something.  He himself well knows what I allude to.  From thence he made a journey to Alexandria, in defiance of the authority of the senate, and against the interests of the republic, and in spite of religious obstacles; but he had Gabinius for his leader, with whom whatever he did was sure to be right.  What were the circumstances of his return from thence? what sort of return was it?  He went from Egypt to the furthest extremity of Gaul before he returned home.  And what was his home?  For at that time every man had possession of his own house; and you had no house anywhere, O Antonius.  House, do you say? what place was there in the whole world where you could set your foot on anything that belonged to you, except Mienum, which you farmed with your partners, as if it had been Sisapo?[15]