time was taken up every day and night with the vilest occupations. The
son, having been brought up in them, not unnaturally tramples and dowses
his superiors, using a species of abuse invented in the workshops and on
the street corners.

[-5-] "Now being of such an origin yourself, and after growing up naked
among your naked companions, picking up pig manure and sheep dung and
human excrement, have you dared, O most accursed wretch, first to slander
the youth of Antony who had the advantage of pedagogues and teachers as
his rank demanded, and next to impugn him because in celebrating the
Lupercalia, an ancestral festival, he came naked into the Forum? But I
ask you, you that always used all the clothes of others on account
of your father's business and were stripped by whoever met you and
recognized them, what ought a man who was not only priest but also leader
of his fellow priests to have done? Not to conduct the procession, not to
celebrate the festival, not to sacrifice according to ancestral custom,
not to appear naked, not to anoint himself? 'But it is not for that that
I censure him,' he answers, 'but because he delivered a speech and
that kind of speech naked in the Forum.' Of course this man has become
acquainted in the fuller's shop with all minute matters of etiquette,
that he should detect a real mistake and be able to rebuke it properly.

[-6-] "In regard to this matter I will say later all that needs to be
said, but just now I want to ask the speaker a question or two. Is it
not true that you for your part were nourished by the ills of others and
educated in the misfortunes of your neighbors and for this reason are
acquainted with no liberal branch of knowledge, that you have established
a kind of association here and are always waiting, like the harlots, for
a man who will give something, and that having many men in your pay to
attract profit to you you pry into people's affairs to find out who has