Turn to another school, and then speak thus of a triumph: “What is the meaning of that chariot? What is the use of those generals bound in front of the chariot? and of the images of towns? and of the gold? and of the silver? and of the lieutenants on horseback? and of the tribunes? What avail all the shouts of the soldiery? and all that procession? To hunt for applause, to be carried through the city, to wish to he gazed upon, are all mere trifles, believe me, things to please children. There is nothing in all those things which you can grasp as solid, nothing which you can refer to as causing pleasure to the body. [61] You see me who have returned from the same province on returning from which Titus Flamininus, and Lucius Paullus, and Quintus Metellus, and Titus Didius, and multitudes of others, inflamed with empty desires, have celebrated triumphs; you see me, I say, returning in such a spirit, that I trampled my Macedonian laurels under foot at the Esquiline gate,—that I arrived with fifteen ill-dressed men thirsting at the Coelimontane gate, where my freedman had a couple of days before hired me a house suited to so great a general; and if that house had not been to be let, I should have pitched myself a tent in the Campus Martius. Meanwhile, O Caesar, in consequence of my neglect of all that triumphal pomp, my money remains safe at home, and will remain there. Immediately on my return, I gave in my accounts to the treasury, as your law required; but in no other particular have I complied with your law. And if you examine those accounts, you will see that no one has ever gained greater advantage from his learning than I have. For they are drawn up so learnedly and so cleverly, that the clerk who made the return to the treasury, when he had written them all out, scratching his head with his left hand, murmured out, ‘Indeed, the accounts are wonderfully clear, the money oi)/xetai.’”[10] If you make him this speech, I have no doubt that you will be able to recall him to his senses even when actually stepping into his chariot. [cap.26] [62]
O thou darkness, thou filth, thou disgrace! O thou forgetful of your father's family, scarcely mindful of your mother's,—there is actually something so broken-down, so mean, so base, so sordid, even too low to be considered worthy of the Milanese crier, your grandfather.