em. For
many years afterward they were called Antonianae, and the first general
use of the term by which we know them has probably been comparatively
modern. The one name does as well as another, but it is odd that
speeches from Demosthenes should have given a name to others so well
known as these made by Cicero against Antony. Plutarch, however,
mentions the name, saying that it had been given to the speeches by
Cicero himself.

In this, the first, he is ironically reticent as to Antony's violence
and unpatriotic conduct. Antony was not present, and Cicero tells his
hearers with a pleasant joke that to Antony it may be allowed to be
absent on the score of ill-health, though the indulgence had been
refused to him. Antony is his friend, and why had Antony treated him so
roughly? Was it unusual for Senators to be absent? Was Hannibal at the
gate, or were they dealing for peace with Pyrrhus, as was the case when
they brought the old blind Appius down to the House? Then he comes to
the question of the hour, which was, nominally, the sanctioning as law
those acts of Caesar's which he had decreed by his own will before his
death. When a tyrant usurps power for a while and is then deposed, no
more difficult question can be debated. Is it not better to take the law
as he leaves it, even though the law has become a law illegally, than
encounter all the confusion of retrograde action? Nothing could have
been more iniquitous than some of Sulla's laws, but Cicero had opposed
their abrogation. But here the question was one not of Caesar's laws, but
of decrees subsequently made by Antony and palmed off upon the people as
having been found among Caesar's papers. Soon after Caesar's death a
decision had been obtained by Antony in favor of Caesar's laws or acts,
and hence had come these impudent forgeries under the guise of which
Antony could cause what writings he chose to be made public. "I think
that Caesar's acts should be maintained," says Cicero, "not as being in
themselves good, for that no one can assert. I wish that Antony were
present here without his usual friends," he adds, alluding to his armed
satellites. "He would tell us after what manner he would maintain those
acts of Caesar's. Are they to be found in notes and scraps and small
documents brought forward by one witness, or not brought forward at all
but only told to us? And shall those which he engraved in bronze, and
which he wished to be known as the will of the peopl