before us beyond the question of protection, in order that the consuls may be able to hold the senate with safety on the first of January, still you appear to me to have acted with great wisdom and great prudence in giving an opportunity of debating the general circumstances of the republic.  For when you decided that the senate could not be held with safety without some protection or other, you at the same time asserted by that decision that the wickedness and audacity of Antonius was still continuing its practices within our walls.

Vi.  Wherefore, I will embrace every consideration in my opinion which I am now going to deliver, a course to which you, I feel sure, have no objection, in order that authority may be conferred by us on admirable generals, and that hope of reward may be held out by us to gallant soldiers, and that a formal decision may be come to, not by words only, but also by actions, that Antonius is not only not a consul, but is even an enemy.  For if he be consul, then the legions which have deserted the consul deserve beating[24] to death.  Caesar is wicked, Brutus is impious, since they of their own heads have levied an army against the consul.  But if new honours are to be sought out for the soldiers on account of their divine and immortal merits, and if it is quite impossible to show gratitude enough to the generals, who is there who must not think that man a public enemy, whose conduct is such that those who are in arms against him are considered the saviours of the republic?

Again, how insulting is he in his edicts! how ignorant!  How like a barbarian!  In the first place, how has he heaped abuse on Caesar, in terms drawn from his recollection of his own debauchery and profligacy.  For where can we find any one who is chaster than this young man? who is more modest? where have we among our youth a more illustrious example of the old-fashioned strictness?  Who, on the other hand, is more profligate than the man who abuses him?  He reproaches the son of Caius Caesar with his want of noble blood, when even his natural[25] father, if he had been alive, would have been made consul.  His mother is a woman of Aricia.  You might suppose he was saying a woman of Tralles, or of Ephesus.  Just see how we all who come from the municipal towns—­that is to say, absolutely all of us—­are looked down upon; for how few of us are there who do not come from those towns? and what municipal town is there which he does not despise who looks with such contempt on Aricia; a town most ancient as to its antiquity; if we regard its rights, united with us by treaty; if we regard its vicinity, almost close to us; if we regard the high character of its inhabitants, most honourable?  It is from Aricia that we have received the Voconian and Atinian laws; from Aricia have come many of those magistrates who have filled our curule chairs, both in our fathers’ recollection and in our own; from Aricia have sprung many of the best