e presiding at
the funeral of the tyrant, if that ought to be called a funeral. All
that fine panegyric was yours, that commiseration was yours, that
exhortation was yours. It was you--you, I say--who hurled those
firebrands, both those with which your friend himself was nearly
burnt, and those by which the house of Lucius Bellienus was set
on fire and destroyed. It was you who let loose those attacks of
abandoned men, slaves for the most part, which we repelled by violence
and our own personal exertions; it was you who set them on to attack
our houses. And yet you, as if you had wiped off all the soot and
smoke in the ensuing days, carried those excellent resolutions in the
Capitol, that no document conferring any exemption, or granting any
favour, should be published after the ides of March. You recollect
yourself, what you said about the exiles; you know what you said
about the exemption; but the best thing of all was, that you for ever
abolished the name of the dictatorship in the republic. Which act
appeared to show that you had conceived such a hatred of kingly power
that you took away all fear of it for the future, on account of him
who had been the last dictator.

To other men the republic now seemed established, but it did not
appear so at all to me, as I was afraid of every sort of shipwreck,
as long as you were at the helm. Have I been deceived? or, was it
possible for that man long to continue unlike himself? While you were
all looking on, documents were fixed up over the whole Capitol, and
exemptions were being sold, not merely to individuals, but to entire
states. The freedom of the city was also being given now not to single
persons only, but to whole provinces. Therefore, if these acts are to
stand,--and stand they cannot if the republic stands too,--then, O
conscript fathers, you have lost whole provinces; and not the revenues
only, but the actual empire of the Roman people has been diminished by
a market this man held in his own house.

XXXVII. Where are the seven hundred millions of sesterces which were
entered in the account-books which are in the temple of Ops? a sum
lamentable indeed, as to the means by which it was procured, but still
one which, if it were not restored to those to whom it belonged, might
save us from taxes. And how was it, that when you owed forty millions
of sesterces on the fifteenth of March, you had ceased to owe them
by the first of April? Those things are quite countless w