allow them to share in that disaster and that flight, and the praetors, and men of praetorian rank, and the tribunes of the people, and a great part of the senate, and all the flower of the youth of the city, and, in a word, the republic itself was driven out and expelled from its abode.  As, then, there is in seeds the cause which produces trees and plants, so of this most lamentable war you were the seed.  Do you, O conscript fathers, grieve that these armies of the Roman people have been slain?  It is Antonius who slew them.  Do you regret your most illustrious citizens?  It is Antonius, again, who has deprived you of them.  The authority of this order is overthrown; it is Antonius who has overthrown it.  Everything, in short, which we have seen since that time, (and what misfortune is there that we have not seen?) we shall, if we argue rightly, attribute wholly to Antonius.  As Helen was to the Trojans, so has that man been to this republic,—­the cause of war, the cause of mischief, the cause of ruin.  The rest of his tribuneship was like the beginning.  He did everything which the senate had laboured to prevent, as being impossible to be done consistently with the safety of the republic.  And see, now, how gratuitously wicked he was even in accomplishing his wickedness.

XXIII.  He restored many men who had fallen under misfortune.  Among them no mention was made of his uncle.  If he was severe, why was he not so to every one?  If he was merciful, why was he not merciful to his own relations?  But I say nothing of the rest.  He restored Licinius Lenticula, a man who had been condemned for gambling, and who was a fellow-gamester of his own.  As if he could not play with a condemned man; but in reality, in order to pay by a straining of the law in his favour, what he had lost by the dice.  What reason did you allege to the Roman people why it was desirable that he should be restored?  I suppose you said that he was absent when the prosecution was instituted against him; that the cause was decided without his having been heard in his defence; that there was not by a law any judicial proceeding established with reference to gambling; that he had been put down by violence or by arms; or lastly, as was said in the case of your uncle, that the tribunal had been bribed with money.  Nothing of this sort was said.  Then he was a good man, and one worthy of the republic.  That, indeed, would have been nothing to the purpose, but still, since being condemned does not go for much, I would forgive you if that were the truth.  Does not he restore to the full possession of his former privileges the most worthless man possible,—­one who would not hesitate to play at dice even in the forum, and who had been convicted under the law which exists respecting gambling,—­does not he declare in the most open manner his own propensities?