M. Tullius Cicero, Against Piso
C. D. Yonge, Ed.

[55] But why do I count up all the people who did not go forth to meet you? when I say that scarcely any one did, not even of that most officious body of candidates for office, though they had been repeatedly warned and requested to do so, both on that very day, and many days before.

Short gowns were ready for the lictors at the gate, which they took, and laid aside their military cloaks, and so formed a new crowd to escort their chief. And in this manner he, the Macedonian “Imperator,” returning home from his mighty and from his important province, after three years government, entered the city in such a guise that no obscure peddler ever returned home in a more solitary condition. And yet this is the very point on which (so ready is he to defend himself) he finds fault with me. When I said that he had entered the city by the Caelimontane gate, that ever ready man wanted to lay me a wager that he had entered by the Esquiline gate; as if I was bound to know, or as if any one of you had heard, or as if it had anything on earth to do with the matter, by what gate you had entered, as long as it was not by the triumphal one; for that is the gate which had previously always been open for the Macedonian proconsuls. You are the first person ever discovered who, having been invested with consular authority there, did not triumph on your return from Macedonia.