point where I started. That Antony against whom he has inveighed, seeing
Caesar exalted over our government, caused him by granting what seemed
personal favors to a friend not to put into effect any of the projects
that he had in mind. Nothing so diverts persons from objects which they
may attain without caring to secure them righteously, as for those who
fear such results to appear to endure the former's conduct willingly.
These persons in authority have no regard for their own consciousness of
guilt, but if they think they have been detected, they are ashamed and
afraid: thereafter they usually take what is said to them as flattery and
believe the opposite, and any action which may result from the words as
a plot, being suspicious in the midst of their shame. Antony knew
this thoroughly, and first of all he selected the Lupercalia and that
procession in order that Caesar in the relaxation of his spirit and the
fun of the affair might be rebuked with immunity, and next he selected
the Forum and the rostra that his patron might be shamed by the very
places. And he fabricated the commands from the populace, in order that
hearing them Caesar might reflect not on what Antony was saying at the
time, but on what the Roman people would order a man to say. How could
he have believed that this injunction had really been laid upon any one,
when he knew that the people had not voted anything of the kind and did
not hear them shouting out. But it was right for him to hear this in the
Roman Forum, where we had often joined in many deliberations for freedom,
and beside the rostra from which we had sent forth thousands and
thousands of measures in behalf of the democracy, and at the festival of
the Lupercalia, in order that he should remember Romulus, and from the
mouth of the consul that he might call to mind the deeds of the early
consuls, and in the name of the people, that he might ponder the fact
that he was undertaking to be tyrant not over Africans or Gauls or
Egyptians, but over very Romans. These words made him turn about; they
humiliated him. And whereas if any one else had offered him the diadem,