[33]
Are
you living in this city as ignorant of what passes as if you were visitors?
Are your ears all abroad, do they keep aloof from all the ordinary topics of
conversation of the city, as to what laws (if, indeed, they are to be called
laws, and not rather firebrands to destroy the city, pestilences to
annihilate the republic) that man was intending to impose upon all of us, to
brand on our foreheads? Exhibit, I beg you, Sextus Clodius, produce, I beg,
that copy of your laws which they say that you saved from your house, and
from the middle of the armed band which threatened you by night and bore
aloft, like another palladium, in order, forsooth, to be able to carry that
splendid present that instrument for discharging the duties of the
tribuneship, to some one, if you could obtain his election, who would
discharge those duties according to your directions. And
*** [he was going to divide the freedmen among all the tribes, and by his new law to add all the slaves who were going to be emancipated, but who had not yet received their freedom, so that they might vote equally with the free citizens.]1 Would he have dared to make mention of this law, which Sextus Clodius boasts was devised by him, while Milo was alive, not to say while he was consul? For of all of us I cannot venture to say all that I was going to say. But you consider what enormous faults the law itself must have had, when the mere mention of it for the purpose of finding fault with it is so offensive. And he looked at me with the expression of countenance which he was in the habit of putting on when he was threatening everybody with every sort of calamity. That light of the senate-house moves me.2
*** [he was going to divide the freedmen among all the tribes, and by his new law to add all the slaves who were going to be emancipated, but who had not yet received their freedom, so that they might vote equally with the free citizens.]1 Would he have dared to make mention of this law, which Sextus Clodius boasts was devised by him, while Milo was alive, not to say while he was consul? For of all of us I cannot venture to say all that I was going to say. But you consider what enormous faults the law itself must have had, when the mere mention of it for the purpose of finding fault with it is so offensive. And he looked at me with the expression of countenance which he was in the habit of putting on when he was threatening everybody with every sort of calamity. That light of the senate-house moves me.2