But lest by any chance, while enumerating his numerous exploits, our
speech should pass over the finest action of Marcus Antonius, let us
come to the Lupercalia.

XXXIV. He does not dissemble, O conscript fathers; it is plain that he
is agitated; he perspires; he turns pale. Let him do what he pleases,
provided he is not sick, and does not behave as he did in the Minucian
colonnade. What defence can be made for such beastly behaviour? I
wish to hear, that I may see the fruit of those high wages of that
rhetorician, of that land given in Leontini. Your colleague was
sitting in the rostra, clothed in purple robe, on a golden chair,
wearing a crown. You mount the steps; you approach his chair; (if you
were a priest of Pan, you ought to have recollected that you were
consul too;) you display a diadem. There is a groan over the whole
forum. Where did the diadem come from? For you had not picked it up
when lying on the ground, but you had brought it from home with you,
a premeditated and deliberately planned wickedness. You placed the
diadem on his head amid the groans of the people; he rejected it amid
great applause. You then alone, O wicked man, were found, both to
advise the assumption of kingly power, and to wish to have him for
your master who was your colleague; and also to try what the Roman
people might be able to bear and to endure. Moreover, you even sought
to move his pity; you threw yourself at his feet as a suppliant;
begging for what? to be a slave? You might beg it for yourself, when
you had lived in such a way from the time that you were a boy that you
could bear everything, and would find no difficulty in being a slave;
but certainly you had no commission from the Roman people to try for
such a thing for them.