Political Speeches (Oxford World's Classics) (48 page)

Was it to formulate arguments such as these, you utter lunatic, that you spent day after day declaiming in a country house that rightfully belongs to someone else?
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Though, as your closest friends are always saying, the reason you declaim is to help you belch up your wine, not to sharpen your intelligence. But you retain, for your own amusement, a master elected by yourself and your fellow-drinkers, a rhetorician
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whom you have given leave to say what he likes against you, a witty fellow by all accounts—but of course the task of finding suitable subject matter with which to attack you and your friends is hardly a difficult one. Observe what a difference there is between you and your grandfather:
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he weighed his words and said
what would benefit his case; you gabble irrelevances. [43] But what a fee your rhetorician received! Listen, listen, conscript fathers, and learn what wounds our country has sustained! You assigned two thousand
iugera
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of the plain of Leontini to the rhetorician Sextus Clodius, and tax-free as well: that is the enormous price the Roman people had to pay so that you could learn to be a fool. Surely, you criminal, you did not find this gift, also, in Caesar’s notebooks? But I shall be talking later
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about the land at Leontini and in Campania, land which Antonius stole from the state and profaned with the most scandalous occupants.

I have now said as much as I need to in reply to his charges. But I still ought to say something about my censorious critic himself. I am not going to pour forth everything that could be said on the subject: after all, if we cross swords often, as we are bound to, I will always need to have fresh material. But even so, the sheer number of his crimes and misdemeanours affords me ample scope.

[44] Would you like us, then, to look at your record from your childhood onwards? Yes, I think so: let’s start at the beginning. Do you remember how when you were still a child you went bankrupt?
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‘That was my father’s fault,’ you will say. I grant it: your defence is a model of filial duty! But what reflects your own effrontery is that you sat in the fourteen rows, when under the Roscian law
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there was a specific place set aside for bankrupts—regardless of whether their bankruptcy was their own fault or the result of bad luck.

Then you assumed the toga of manhood—and immediately turned it into a toga of womanhood.
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First you were a common prostitute: you had a fixed rate for your shameful services, and not a low one either. But soon Curio
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appeared on the scene. He saved you from having to support yourself as a prostitute, fitted you out in the dress of a married lady, as it were, and settled you in good, steady wedlock. [45] No slave boy bought for sexual gratification was ever as much in his master’s power as you were in Curio’s. How many times did his father
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throw you out of his house! How many times did he post guards to stop you crossing his threshold! But you, with night to aid you, lust to drive you, and the prospect of payment to compel you, had yourself lowered in through the roof-tiles. Such disgrace that house could endure no longer. Are you aware that I am speaking about things of which I am exceptionally well informed? Cast your mind back to the time when the elder Curio was confined
to bed by his grief. The son threw himself in tears at my feet and asked me to help you out. He begged me to protect him from his father’s anger if he asked him for six million sesterces—that being the sum for which he said he had stood surety for you. As for himself, in the ardour of his passion he declared that he could not endure the pain of being separated from you, and would therefore take himself off into exile. [46] How deep were the troubles of a flourishing family which I at that time laid to rest, or rather removed altogether! I persuaded the father to pay off his son’s debts;
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to use the family’s capital to redeem a young man of such promising character and abilities;
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and to assert his rights and powers as the head of the family to prevent his son not only from being a friend of yours, but even from seeing you. When you remembered that I was responsible for all of this, would you have dared to provoke me with your insults if you did not rely on the protection of those swords which we now see in front of us?

[47] But let us now pass over his sexual crimes and depravity: there are some things I cannot decently relate. (You have more freedom of speech than I, because you have allowed things to be done to you which no opponent with any sense of modesty would ever bring himself to speak of.) So let me move on to the rest of his career. I shall touch upon this only briefly: I am keen to hurry on to his behaviour in the Civil War—a catastrophic period for our country—and his behaviour today. Now I realize that you, gentlemen, know more about this than I do;
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nevertheless, I would ask you to pay me close attention, just as you are doing now. In situations such as this, our spirits should be stirred not only by discovering the facts, but also by recollecting them. Even so, we should, I think, cut short the middle of the story, so as not to be too late in reaching the end.

[48] Intimate with Clodius during his tribunate he was, this man who now recounts the favours he has done me. He was the torch that set alight all his conflagrations, and even at that time he was up to something inside Clodius’ house—he knows very well what I am talking about.
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Then he marched off to Alexandria, in defiance of the senate’s declared wishes, and in defiance of the state and divine prohibition.
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But of course Gabinius was his commander, and anything he did with
him
had to be all right! And what about his return home—what was that like? From Egypt he went straight to Furthest Gaul,
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without first going home. But what home am I talking about?
In those days everyone had their own home—though you had none.
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Home, do I say? Was there anywhere in the world where you could set foot on ground that belonged to you, with the single exception of your place at Misenum—and that you owned jointly with others, like some sort of Sisapo?
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[49] You returned from Gaul to stand for the quaestorship.
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I dare you to say that you called on your mother
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before coming to see me. I had received a letter from Caesar asking if I would accept your apologies, and so I did not allow you to say a single word on the subject of reconciliation. After that you paid me attentions, and I kept a lookout for you in your campaign for the quaestorship. It was then that you attempted to kill Publius Clodius in the forum before the approving eyes of the Roman people.
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Though you did this on your own initiative, and not on my prompting, you nevertheless declared that, as far as you were concerned, you would never make adequate amends for the wrongs you had done me
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unless you actually killed him. I am therefore astonished that you should now say that it was at my prompting that Milo carried out that deed, since when you offered me the same service on your own initiative I did nothing to encourage you. In any case I preferred, should you persevere in your attempts, that the deed be put down to your credit rather than to your desire to do me a favour.

[50] You were elected quaestor; then all of a sudden, without a decree of the senate, without the lots being drawn, without any legal justification, you ran off to Caesar.
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In your view, once you had squandered all you had to live on, that was the only place in the world that could serve as a refuge for your poverty, debt, and profligacy. But once you had stuffed yourself there with Caesar’s largesse and your own plunderings—if you can call it stuffing, when you immediately throw up what you have just swallowed—you flew, destitute, to the tribunate, intending to conduct yourself in that magistracy, if at all possible, just as your husband had.
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Now please bear with me, gentlemen, while I tell you not of the vile excesses he has perpetrated against his own self and the honour of his family, but of the treacherous crimes he has committed against us and our fortunes—that is to say, against the whole country. What you will discover is that the root of all our troubles sprang from this man’s wickedness.

[51] On 1 January in the consulship of Lucius Lentulus and Gaius
Marcellus,
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you were all anxious to shore up the state, tottering as it was and threatening to collapse; and you were willing to pay due consideration to Gaius Caesar himself, so long as he were of sound mind. But then this man here used his tribunate, which he had sold and made over to Caesar, to block your deliberations, and placed his own neck beneath that axe
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which has come down on many others for lesser crimes. Against you, Marcus Antonius, the senate passed that decree—a senate still intact, its leading lights not yet put out—that decree which is customarily passed against a civilian enemy, according to the tradition of our ancestors. And have you dared to attack me before the conscript fathers—this same order which judged that I was the saviour of the state,
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and you the enemy of the state?

For some time now, the matter of that crime of yours has not been raised—but its memory is not erased. As long as the human race, as long as the name of the Roman people shall endure—and that will be for ever, if you allow it—so long will that pestilential veto of yours be spoken of. [52] What self-interested action, what over-hasty decision was being taken by the senate when you, a single youth,
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prevented that entire order from passing a decree on the national security, not once but again and again, refusing all negotiation over the senate’s expressed wish? What was it trying to do except prevent you from completely overturning and destroying the state? But neither the requests of the leaders of our country, nor the warnings of your elders, nor the representations of a packed senate could bring you to alter a decision which you had put up for sale and knocked down to the highest bidder. Then it was that, after many solutions had been tried, there inevitably fell on you that stroke which fell on few before you,
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and from which none had escaped unscathed.
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[53] Then it was that the senate put weapons into the hands of the consuls and the other holders of power, military and civil, for use against you—weapons which you would never have escaped, had you not gone over to those of Caesar.

It was you, yes, you, Marcus Antonius, who first gave Gaius Caesar, desperate as he was to wreak havoc, an excuse to make war on his country. After all, what else did he say, what other excuse did he give for his demented intention and action than that the veto had been disregarded, the tribunician prerogative abolished, and the freedom of Antonius curtailed by the senate? I will not explain how specious, how frivolous these excuses were, especially given that there can
never be any just cause whatsoever for a man’s taking up arms against his country. But enough of Caesar: you surely must confess that the cause of that ruinous war was you and you alone. [54]How wretched you must be if you have grasped this! And more wretched still if you have not grasped that this is what is being recorded in history, this is what is being handed down to posterity, and this is what will be the recollection of every generation for the rest of time: that you were the sole cause of the consuls being driven out of Italy, and with them Gnaeus Pompeius, the shining glory of the empire of the Roman people, and every consular whose health allowed him to take part in that disastrous flight, the praetors, the praetorians, the tribunes of the plebs, a large part of the senate, the flower of our young manhood—in a word, the whole of the state driven out and banished from its home! [55] Just as seeds contain the origin of trees and plants, so you were the seed of this most lamentable war. Gentlemen, you grieve that three armies of the Roman people were slaughtered:
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it was Antonius who slaughtered them! You mourn the loss of our most illustrious citizens: it was Antonius who robbed you of them! The authority of this order was expunged: it was Antonius who expunged it! And everything that we have seen happen since that time (indeed, what calamity have we not seen?), we shall, if we calculate correctly, attribute to Antonius alone. Just as Helen was to Troy, so was he to this city both the cause of war and the bringer of pestilence and death.

The rest of his tribunate resembled its beginning. He did everything that the senate, while the state was still intact, had made impossible. But let me tell you of a crime within a crime. [56] He restored many people who had been convicted—but never a word about his own uncle.
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If he was being strict, then why not strict towards everyone? If merciful, then why not merciful towards his own family? To say nothing of all the others, he restored his gaming partner Licinius Lenticula,
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who had been convicted for gambling—as if it were really the case that the man’s conviction prevented him from gambling with him! No, the reason he restored him was so that he could pay off his own gambling debts by carrying a law in his friend’s favour. But what explanation did you give the Roman people as to why he should be restored? It was, I imagine, that he had been prosecuted in his absence; that he had been convicted without a defence; that there had been no legally constituted court to try cases
of gambling; that he had been a victim of armed violence; or that, as used to be said in your uncle’s case, the jury had been bribed! No, it was none of these. But he was a good man and deserved to be a citizen. That is irrelevant; but since being convicted counts for nothing these days, I would pardon him myself if this were true. But when an utterly disreputable individual, the sort of person who would not hesitate to start gambling even in the forum, is properly convicted under the gambling law, doesn’t the person who restores him reveal his own addiction in the most blatant manner possible?

[57] In this same tribunate, Caesar, on his departure for Spain, handed Italy over to this man here
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for him to trample underfoot. Just think of his progress along the roads, his visitations of towns! I appreciate that I am dealing with matters that are extremely well known and much discussed, and that the events I am and will be talking about are more familiar to those who were in Italy at that time than to me who was not.
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Nevertheless, I will pick out particular details, even though what I have to say cannot possibly equate to your first-hand knowledge. After all, was there ever, anywhere on earth, such scandal, such disgrace, and such dishonour? [58] A tribune of the plebs was conveyed in a gig. Lictors wreathed in laurel marched in front of him.
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In their midst, an actress
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was carried in an open litter; respectable people, coming from the country towns and having inevitably to meet her, addressed her not by her well-known stage name, but as ‘Volumnia’. A coach-load of pimps took up the rear; and his mother, cast out, walked behind her filthy son’s mistress as though that woman were her daughter-in-law. Poor mother, to have such disastrous offspring!
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With the imprint of these scandals Antonius stamped on every town, prefecture, and colony, in fact on the whole of Italy.