[90]
Would that man when praetor, much
more when consul, provided only that these temples and these walls could
have stood so long if he had been alive, and could have remained till his
consulship; would he, I say, if alive, have done no harm, when even after he
was dead he burned the senate-house, one of his satellites, Sextus Clodius,
being the ringleader in the tumult? What more miserable, more grievous, more
bitter sight have we ever seen than that? that that temple of sanctity, of
honour, of wisdom, of the public council, the head of the city, the altar of
the allies, the harbour of all nations, the abode granted by the universal
Roman people to one of the orders of the state, should be burnt, profaned,
and destroyed?1 and that that should be
done, not by an ignorant mob, although that would have been a
miserable thing, but by one single person? who, if he dared so much in his
character of burner of a dead man, what would he not have done as
standard-bearer of a living one? He selected the senate-house, of all the
places in the city, to throw him down in, in order that when dead he might
burn what he had overturned while alive.
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1 When Clodius was killed, his slaves fled, and left his dead body in the road; and it was brought to Rome the next day by Sextus Tedius, a senator, who was passing by and saw it; and then it was exposed to the view of the populace of the city. The next day the mob, headed by Sextus Clodius, carried the body naked, so as to show his wounds, into the forum, and placed it on the rostra; and then the tribunes harangued the people on the subject and wrought them up to such a pitch of the excitement, that, snatching up the body, they carried it into the senate-house, and tearing up the benches and tables, dressed up a funeral pile on the spot, and, together with the body, burnt the senate-house itself with the Basilica Porcia which joined it.
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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