Cum Senatui gratias egit

For who ever could have any hope of any good existing in that man, the earliest period of whose life was made openly subservient to everyone's lusts; who had not the heart to repel the obscene impurity of men from the holiest portion of his person? who, after he had ruined his own estate with no less activity than he afterwards displayed in his endeavours to ruin the republic, supported his indigence and his luxury by every sort of pandering and infamy; who, if he had not taken refuge at the altar of the tribuneship, would not have been able to escape from the authority of the praetor, nor the multitude of his creditors, nor the seizure of his goods. And if he had not while in discharge of that office, passed that law about the piratical war, he, in truth, would have yielded to his own poverty and wickedness, and had recourse to piracy himself; and who would have done so with less injury to the republic than he did by remaining within our walls as an impious enemy and robber. It was he who was inspecting victims, and sitting in the discharge of that duty, when a tribune of the people procured a law to be passed that no regard should be had to the auspices,—that no one should on that account be allowed to interrupt the assembly or the comitia, or to put his veto on the passing of a law; and that the Aelian and Fufian [*](“The Aelia lex and Rufia lex were passed about the end of the sixth century of the city, and gave all magistrates the obnuntiatio, or power of preventing or dissolving the comitia by observing the omens, and declaring them to be unfavourable.”—Smith, Dict. Ant. p. 560, v. Lex.) laws should have no validity, which our ancestors had enacted, intending them to be the firmest protection of the republic against the insanity of the tribunes.