But I come back now to that splendid harangue of yours. You are the man who disapprove of cruelty, are you? you who, when the senate had decided on displaying its grief and indignation by a change of their garments, and when you saw that the whole republic was grieving in the mourning of its most honourable order, you, O merciful man, what do you do? Why, what no tyrant in any country of barbarians ever dreamt of. For, I say nothing of the fact of a consul issuing an edict, that the senate should not obey a resolution of the senate; an action than which none more shameful can either be done or imagined. I return to the merciful disposition of that man, who thinks that the senate were over cruel in preserving the country. [18] He with his mate—whom however he was desirous to surpass in all vices—dared to issue an edict that the senate should return to its usual dress contrary to the resolution which that body itself had passed. What tyrant in any part of Scythia ever behaved in such a way as not to permit those men to mourn whom he was loading with misery? You leave them their grief, you take away the emblems of grief, you take away their tears not by comforting them but by threatening them. But even if the conscript fathers had changed their attire not in consequence of any public resolution, but out of private affection or pity still it would have been an intolerable stretch of power that your interdict should prohibit them from doing so; but when the senate in a full house had passed a resolution to that effect, and all the other orders in the state had already changed their attire, then you, a consul, dragged out of a dark dirty cookshop, with that shaved dancing girl of yours, forbade the senate of the Roman people to mourn for the setting and death of the republic. [cap.9]