foreign office until five years should have elapsed:  this they did to see if people when it was no longer in any one’s power to be immediately elected would cease their craze for office.  For no moderation was being shown and there was no purity in their methods, but they vied with one another in expending great sums and fighting more than ever, so that once the consul Calvinus was wounded.  Hence no consul nor praetor nor prefect of the city had any successor, but at the beginning of the year the Romans were absolutely without a government in these branches.

[B.C. 52 (a.u. 702)]

[-47-] Nothing good resulted from this, and among other things the market recurring every ninth day was held on the very first of January.  This seemed to the Romans to have taken place not by accident, and being considered in the light of a portent it caused trepidation.  The same feeling was increased when an owl was both seen and caught in the city, a statue exuded perspiration for three days, a flash darted from the south to the east, and many thunderbolts, many clods, stones, tiles and blood descended through the air.  It seems to me that that decree passed the previous year, near the close, with regard to Serapis and Isis, was a portent equal to any:  the senate decided to tear down their temples, which some private individuals had built.  For they did not reverence these gods any long time and even when it became the fashion to render public devotion to them, they settled them outside the pomerium.

[-48-] Such being the state of things in the city, with no one in charge of affairs, murders occurred practically every day and they did not finish the elections, though they were eager for office and employed bribery and assassination on account of it.  Milo, for instance, who was seeking the consulship, met Clodius on the Appian Way and at first simply wounded him:  then, fearing he would attack him for what had been done, he slew him.  He at once freed all the servants concerned in the business, and his hope was that he might be more easily acquitted of the murder, now that the man was dead, than he would be for the wound in case he had survived.  The people in the city heard of this about evening and were thrown into a terrible uproar:  for to factional disturbances there was being added a starting-point for war and evils, and the middle class, even though they hated Clodius, yet on account of humanity and because on this excuse they hoped to get rid of Milo, showed displeasure.[-49-] While they were in this frame of mind Rufus and Titus Munatius Plancus took hold of them and excited them to greater wrath.  As tribunes they conveyed the body into the Forum just before dawn, placed it on the rostra, exhibited it to all, and spoke appropriate words with lamentations.  So the populace, as a result of what it both saw and heard, was deeply stirred and paid no further heed to considerations of sanctity or things divine, but overthrew all the customs of burial and nearly burned