[11]
For who ever could have any hope of any good existing in that man, the earliest period of
whose life was made openly subservient to everyone's lusts; who had not the heart to repel the
obscene impurity of men from the holiest portion of his person? who, after he had ruined his
own estate with no less activity than he afterwards displayed in his endeavours to ruin the
republic, supported his indigence and his luxury by every sort of pandering and infamy; who,
if he had not taken refuge at the altar of the tribuneship, would not have been able to escape
from the authority of the praetor, nor the multitude of his creditors, nor the seizure of his
goods. And if he had not while in discharge of that office, passed that law about the
piratical war, he, in truth, would have yielded to his own poverty and wickedness, and had
recourse to piracy himself; and who would have done so with less injury to the republic than
he did by remaining within our walls as an impious enemy and robber. It was he who was
inspecting victims, and sitting in the discharge of that duty, when a tribune of the people
procured a law to be passed that no regard should be had to the auspices,—that no
one should on that account be allowed to interrupt the assembly or the comitia, or to put his veto on the passing of a law; and that the Aelian and
Fufian 1 laws should have no validity, which our ancestors had enacted,
intending them to be the firmest protection of the republic against the insanity of the
tribunes.
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