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[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


1 The passage in brackets is a very doubtful supplement of Beier; which, however, Orellius prefers to any other.

2 Cicero here supposes Sextus Clodius to look menacingly at him, in order to check him in his attack on this intended law.

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  • Commentary references to this page (3):
    • J. B. Greenough, G. L. Kittredge, Select Orations of Cicero, Allen and Greenough's Edition., AG Cic. 10
    • J. B. Greenough, G. L. Kittredge, Select Orations of Cicero, Allen and Greenough's Edition., AG Cic. 40
    • J. B. Greenough, G. L. Kittredge, Select Orations of Cicero, Allen and Greenough's Edition., AG Cic. 86
  • Cross-references to this page (1):
    • A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities (1890), TRIBUS
  • Cross-references in general dictionaries to this page (5):
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