For, as respects the charges that have been brought against him of being in debt, as regards the reproaches which have been levelled at him on the score of prodigality, and of the demands that have been made to see his accounts, just see how briefly I will reply to them. In the first place, he, who is still under the power of his father, keeps no accounts. He has never any transactions connected with borrowing or lending. As to his extravagance, there is one particular item of expense objected to him, that for his house. You say that he dwells in a house which he rents for thirty thousand sesterces.[1] Now, I see by this, that Publius Clodius wants to sell his house; for it is his house that Caelius lives in, at a rent, I suppose, of ten thousand sesterces. And you, O prosecutors, out of your anxiety to please him, have permitted yourselves this enormous lie to suit his purposes. [18]
You have blamed him for dwelling in a house apart from his father, a thing which is not at all to be blamed in a man of his age. For as, labouring in the cause of the republic, he had achieved a victory which was, indeed, annoying to me, but glorious to himself; and as he was now of sufficiently mature age to stand for a magistracy, not only with the permission, but in consequence of even the advice of his father, he left his house, and as his father's house was a long way from the forum, he hired a house on the Palatine Hill, at no very high rent, in order the more easily to be able to visit us at our houses, and to receive visits from his friends. [cap.8]
And while speaking on this topic, I may say what that most illustrious man, Marcus Crassus, said a little time before, when he was making a complaint of the arrival of king Ptolemaeus:—
“I wish that in the Pelian grove.”
[…] And I might go on much farther in applying this poem,
“For my wandering mistress would never”
[…] have given us all this trouble.
“Medea, sick at heart, wounded in the fierce love.”
[2]