XXVI.  Caesar came back from Alexandria, fortunate, as he seemed at least to himself; but in my opinion no one can be fortunate who is unfortunate for the republic.  The spear was set up in front of the temple of Jupiter Stator, and the property of Cnaeus Pompeius Magnus—­(miserable that I am, for even now that my tears have ceased to flow, my grief remains deeply implanted in my heart,)—­the property, I say, of Cnaeus Pompeius the Great was submitted to the pitiless, voice of the auctioneer.  On that one occasion the state forgot its slavery, and groaned aloud, and though men’s minds were enslaved, as everything was kept under by fear, still the groans of the Roman people were free.  While all men were waiting to see who would be so impious, who would be so mad, who would be so declared an enemy to gods and to men as to dare to mix himself up with that wicked auction, no one was found except Antonius, even though there were plenty of men collected round that spear[18] who would have dared anything else.  One man alone was found to dare to do that which the audacity of every one else had shrunk from and shuddered at.  Were you, then, seized with such stupidity,—­or, I should rather say, with such insanity,—­as not to see that if you, being of the rank in which you were born, acted as a broker at all, and above all as a broker in the case of Pompeius’s property, you would be execrated and hated by the Roman people, and that all gods and all men must at once become and for ever continue hostile to you?  But with what violence did that glutton immediately proceed to take possession of the property of that man, to whose valour it had been owing that the Roman people had been more terrible to foreign nations, while his justice had made it dearer to them.

XXVII.  When, therefore, this fellow had begun to wallow in the treasures of that great man, he began to exult like a buffoon in a play, who has lately been a beggar, and has become suddenly rich.  But, as some poet or other says,—­

  “Ill gotten gain comes quickly to an end.”

It is an incredible thing, and almost a miracle, how he in a few, not months, but days, squandered all that vast wealth.  There was an immense quantity of wine, an excessive abundance of very valuable plate, much precious apparel, great quantities of splendid furniture, and other magnificent things in many places, such as one was likely to see belonging to a man who was not indeed luxurious, but who was very wealthy.  Of all this in a few days there was nothing left.  What Charybdis was ever so voracious?  Charybdis, do I say?  Charybdis, if she existed at all, was only one animal.  The ocean, I swear most solemnly, appears scarcely capable of having swallowed up such numbers of things so widely scattered, and distributed in such different places, with such rapidity.  Nothing was shut up, nothing sealed up, no list was made of anything.  Whole storehouses were abandoned to the most worthless of men.  Actors seized on