[116]
That house of mine is almost
entirely empty; scarcely one-tenth part of my house has been added to
Catulus's portico. The pretence was a promenade, and a monument, and that
Tanagran lady Liberty, (all Roman liberty having been entirely put down). He
had set his heart upon a portico with private chambers, paved to the
distance of three hundred feet, with a fine court surrounded by a colonnade,
on the Palatine Hill, commanding a
superb view, and everything else in character, so as far to surpass all
other houses in luxury and splendour. And that scrupulous man, while he was
both buying and selling my house at the same moment, still, even in a time
of such darkness as that, did not venture to give in his own name as the
purchaser. He put up that fellow Scato, a man whose virtue it was, no doubt,
that had made him poor; so poor that among the Marsi, where he was born, he
had no house in which he could take refuge from the rain and yet he said now
that he had purchased the finest house on the Palatine hill. The lower part of the house he assigned not
to his own Fonteian family, but to the Clodian family which he had quitted;
but of all the numerous family of Clodius, no one applied for any share in
his liberality except those who were utterly destitute from indigence and
wickedness.
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M. Tullius Cicero. The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, literally translated by C. D. Yonge, B. A. London. George Bell & Sons, York Street, Covent Garden. 1891.
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