[24]
When you had produced in the assembly Lucius Vettius, who had confessed in
the senate that he had been armed with the intention of putting Cnaeus
Pompeius, that great and illustrious citizen, to death with his own hands;
when you had produced him as a witness in the rostra, and placed him in that temple and place consecrated
by the auspices; (in that place in which other
tribunes of the people have been in the habit of bringing forward the chief
men of the state, in order to sanction their authority by their presence,
there you wished Vettius the informer to employ his tongue and voice in
support of your wickedness and ambitious designs:)—did not Lucius
Vettius say, in that assembly which you had convened, when questioned by
you, that he had had those men for the originators and encouragers of, and
accomplices in that wicked conduct, whom if the city had been deprived of,
(and that was your real object at that time,) it could not have continued to
stand?
You had endeavoured to murder Marcus Bibulus, as you were not contented with
shutting him up in his house; you had stripped him of his consulship,1 you were anxious to
deprive him of his country. You wished also to murder Lucius Lucullus, whose
exploits you envied above measure, because, I suppose, you from your boyhood
had had an eye yourself to the glory of a general; and Caius Curio, the
unceasing enemy of all wicked men, the leader of the public council, a man
of the greatest freedom in maintaining the common liberties of the citizens,
with his son, the chief of the youth of Rome, and who had already shown more devotion to the cause
of the republic than could have been expected from his age;
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1 After the violent way in which Caesar's partisans had treated Bibulus, which has been alluded to in the preceding chapter, Bibulus complained to the senate the next day; but finding that assembly too completely intimidated to take any notice of it, he retired to his own house, and there shut himself up for the remaining eight months of the year of his consulship and determined to act no more in public except by means of edicts.
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