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
and bravest of the Roman knights. But if you disapprove of a wife from
Aricia, why do you approve of one from Tusculum? Although the father
of this most virtuous and excellent woman, Marcus Atius Balbus, a man
of the highest character, was a man of praetorian rank; but the father
of your wife,--a good woman, at all events a rich one,--a fellow of
the name of Bambalio, was a man of no account at all. Nothing could be
lower than he was, a fellow who got his surname as a sort of insult,
derived[26] from the hesitation of his speech and the stolidity of his
understanding. Oh, but your grandfather was nobly born. Yes, he was
that Tuditanus who used to put on a cloak and buskins, and then go
and scatter money from the rostra among the people. I wish he had
bequeathed his contempt of money to his descendants! You have, indeed,
a most glorious nobility of family! But how does it happen that the
son of a woman of Aricia appears to you to be ignoble, when you
are accustomed to boast of a descent on the mother's side which is
precisely the same?[27] Besides, what insanity is it for that man to
say anything about the want of noble birth in men's wives, when his