Dare now, O you Fury to describe yours; the beginning of which was the Compitalitian games, then first celebrated since the time that Lucius Metellus and Quintus Marcius were consuls, contrary to the inclination of this order: games which Quintus Metellus (I am doing injury to a gallant man who is dead when I compare him, to whom this city has produced few equals, to this ill-omened beast)—but he, being consul elect when a certain tribune of the people, relying on his own power, had ordered the master of the games to celebrate them in contempt of a resolution passed by the senate, though still a private individual, forbade it to be done, and he carried that point by the weight of his character, which he had not as yet any power to enforce. You, when the day of the Compitalitia[2] had fallen on the first of January, permitted Sextus Clodius, who had never before filled any office which entitled him to wear the pratetexta, to celebrate the games, and to strut about in a praetexta like a profligate man, as he was, a man thoroughly worthy of your countenance and regard. [9] Therefore, when you had laid this foundation of your consulship, three days after, while you were looking on in silence, the Aelian and Fufian law, that bulwark and wall of tranquillity and peace, was overturned by Publius Clodius, that fatal prodigy and monster of the republic. Not only the guilds which the senate had abolished were restored but countless new ones were established of all the dregs of the city and even of slaves. The same man, immersed in unheard of and impious debaucheries, abolished that old preceptress of modesty and charity, the severity of the censor, while you in the mean time, you sepulchre of the republic, you who say that you were at that time consul at Rome, never by one single word intimated any opinion of your own amid such a terrible shipwreck of the state. [cap.5] [10]
I have not yet said what you did yourself, but only what you allowed to be done. Nor does it make much difference, especially in a consul whether he himself harnesses the republic with pernicious laws mid infamous harangues, or allows others to harass it. Can there be any excuse for a consul, I will not say being disaffected to the state, but sitting with his hands before him dawdling and sleeping amid the greatest commotions of the republic? For nearly a hundred years had we possessed the Aelian and Fufian law; for four hundred years had we enjoyed the censor's power of deciding on, and animadverting on, the conduct of citizens; laws which I will not say no wicked man has ever dared to uproot, but which no one has ever been able to uproot, a power which no one, not if he were ever so profligate has ever attempted to diminish so as to prevent a formal judgment from being passed every fifth year on our morals.