[53] Now you know the circumstances of my return. Now compare yours with it, since, having lost your army, you have brought nothing safe back with you except that pristine countenance and impudence of yours. And who is there who knows where you first came to with those laurelled lictors of yours? What meanders, what turnings and windings did you thread, while seeking for the most solitary possible places? What municipal town saw you? What friend invited you? What entertainer beheld you? Did you not make night take the place of day? solitude of society? a cookshop of the town? so that you did not appear to be returning from Macedonia as a noble commander, but to be being brought back as a disgraced corpse? and even Rome itself was polluted by your arrival. [cap.23] Alas for the disgrace of the family, I will not say the Calpurnian family, but the Calventian; nor will I say the disgrace of this city, but of the municipality of Placentia; nor of your father's family, but of your breeches-wearing[8] kinsmen. How, I say, did you come? Who, I will not say of these men, or of the rest of the citizens, but who, even of your own lieutenants, came to meet you? [54] For Lucius Flaccus, a man most undeserving of the disgrace of being your lieutenant, and more worthy of those counsels by which he was united with me in my consulship for the salvation of the republic, was with me when some one came and said that you had been seen wandering not far from the gate with your house. I know, too, that one of the very bravest of men, a man skillful both in war and in civil business, an intimate friend of mine, Quintus Marcius, one of those lieutenants whose “Imperator” you had been called in battle, when you were in reality a long way off, was at the time of your arrival sitting quietly in his own house. [55] But why do I count up all the people who did not go forth to meet you? when I say that scarcely any one did, not even of that most officious body of candidates for office, though they had been repeatedly warned and requested to do so, both on that very day, and many days before.