What can be more shameful than this? He came into Egypt. He engaged the men of Alexandria in battle. When was it that either this senatorial body or the Roman people undertook this war? He took Alexandria. What else are we to expect from his frenzy, but that he should send letters to the senate concerning such mighty exploits? [50] If he had been in his senses, if he had not been already paying to his country and to the immortal gods that penalty which is the most terrible of all, by his frenzy and insanity, would he have cared, (I say nothing of his leaving his province, of his taking his army out of it, of his declaring and carrying on war of his own accord, of his entering a foreign kingdom without any command from the people or from the senate to do so; conduct which many of the ancient laws, and especially the Cornelian law concerning treason, and the Julian law concerning extortion, forbid in the plainest manner; but I say nothing of all this,)—would he, I say, if he had not been most outrageously mad, have dared to take to himself the province which Publius Lentulus, a man most sincerely attached to this order, had abdicated from scruples of religion, though he had obtained it both by the authority of the senate and by lot when even if there were no religious obstacles in his case, still the usage of our ancestors, and all precedents, and the severest penalties of the laws forbade it? [cap.22] [51]