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and that temper of theirs you not only correctly estimated when you pleaded my cause, but you also encouraged it and kept it up to the mark.

¹⁴ And in that same cause—so far from denying it, I shall ever remember and take pleasure in proclaiming it—you found certain of our noblest citizens more courageous in promoting my recall than they had been in keeping me at Rome; and had they elected to persevere in that policy all along, the recovery of their own ascendancy would have coincided with my restoration.

For when the loyalists had been encouraged by your consulship and set upon their feet again by your admirable and consistent official action, especially when Pompey had taken up the cause, and when Caesar too, who after his brilliant achievements had been honoured by extraordinary and even unprecedented marks of distinction and comlimentary resolutions of the Senate, was now inclined to associate himself with the authority of that order, no unprincipled citizen could have had any opportunity for doing violence to the constitution. ¹⁵ But mark, I beg of you, what followed.

First of all that fiendish violator of women's religious observances, who had shown as little respect for the "good goddess"^[1] as he had for his three sisters, left the court "without a stain on his character," thanks to the votes of those who, when the tribune of the plebs desired by the verdict of honourable men in the court to inflict condign chastisement upon a turbulent fellow-citizen, deprived the Republic of such a precedent for the punishment of sedition as would have been famous for all time; and those same persons later on per-