hile still in the possession of its rights, before so many
of its luminaries were extinguished, passed that decree which, in
accordance with the usage of our ancestors, is at times passed against
an enemy who is a citizen. And have you dared, before these conscript
fathers, to say anything against me, when I have been pronounced by
this order to be the saviour of my country, and when you have been
declared by it to be an enemy of the republic? The mention of that
wickedness of yours has been interrupted, but the recollection of it
has not been effaced. As long as the race of men, as long as the name
of the Roman people shall exist, (and that, unless it is prevented
from being so by your means, will be everlasting,) so long will that
most mischievous interposition of your veto be spoken of. What was
there that was being done by the senate either ambitiously or rashly,
when you, one single young man, forbade the whole order to pass
decrees concerning the safety of the republic? and when you did so,
not once only, but repeatedly? nor would you allow any one to plead
with you in behalf of the authority of the senate; and yet, what did
any one entreat of you, except that you would not desire the republic
to be entirely overthrown and destroyed; when neither the chief men of
the state by their entreaties, nor the elders by their warnings, nor
the senate in a full house by pleading with you, could move you from
the determination which you had already sold and as it were delivered
to the purchaser? Then it was, after having tried many other
expedients previously, that a blow was of necessity struck at you
which had been struck at only few men before you, and which none of
them had ever survived. Then it was that this order armed the consuls,
and the rest of the magistrates who were invested with either military
or civil command, against you, and you never would have escaped them,
if you had not taken refuge in the camp of Caesar.

XXII. It was you, you, I say, O Marcus Antonius, who gave Caius Caesar,
desirous as he already was to throw everything into confusion, the
principal pretext for waging war against his country. For what other
pretence did he allege? what cause did he give for his own most
frantic resolution and action, except that the power of interposition
by the veto had been disregarded, the privileges of the tribunes taken
away, and Antonius's rights abridged by the senate? I say nothing of
how false, how trivial t