and he had taken Armenia from him, which had been given to him by the senate.  While he was alive he deprived him of all these things; now that he is dead, he gives them back again.  And in what words?  At one time he says, “that it appears to him to be just, ...” at another, “that it appears not to be unjust....”  What a strange combination of words!  But while alive, (I know this, for I always supported Deiotarus, who was at a distance,) he never said that anything which we were asking for, for him, appeared just to him.  A bond for ten millions of sesterces was entered into in the women’s apartment, (where many things have been sold, and are still being sold,) by his ambassadors, well-meaning men, but timid and inexperienced in business, without my advice or that of the rest of the hereditary friends of the monarch.  And I advise you to consider carefully what you intend to do with reference to this bond.  For the king himself, of his own accord, without waiting for any of Caesar’s memoranda, the moment that he heard of his death, recovered his own rights by his own courage and energy.  He, like a wise man, knew that this was always the law, that those men from whom the things which tyrants had taken away had been taken, might recover them when the tyrants were slain.  No lawyer, therefore, not even he who is your lawyer and yours alone, and by whose advice you do all these things, will say that anything is due to you by virtue of that bond for those things which had been recovered before that bond was executed.  For he did not purchase them of you; but, before you undertook to sell him his own property, he had taken possession of it.  He was a man—­we, indeed, deserve to be despised, who hate the author of the actions, but uphold the actions themselves.

XXXVIII.  Why need I mention the countless mass of papers, the innumerable autographs which have been brought forward? writings of which there are imitators who sell their forgeries as openly as if they were gladiators’ playbills.  Therefore, there are now such heaps of money piled up in that man’s house, that it is weighed out instead of being counted.[21] But how blind is avarice!  Lately, too, a document has been posted up by which the most wealthy cities of the Cretans are released from tribute; and by which it is ordained that after the expiration of the consulship of Marcus Brutus, Crete shall cease to be a province.  Are you in your senses?  Ought you not to be put in confinement?  Was it possible for there really to be a decree of Caesar’s exempting Crete after the departure of Marcus Brutus, when Brutus had no connexion whatever with Crete while Caesar was alive?  But by the sale of this decree (that you may not, O conscript fathers, think it wholly ineffectual) you have lost the province of Crete.  There was nothing in the whole world which any one wanted to buy that this fellow was not ready to sell.