[26] He had brought down from the Apennines rustic and barbarian slaves, whom you saw, with whom he had ravaged the public woods and Etruria. The matter was not concealed at all. In truth he used to say undisguisedly that the consulship could not be taken from Milo, but that life could. He often hinted as much in the senate he said it plainly in the public assembly. Besides, when Favonius, a brave man, asked him what he hoped for by giving way to such madness while Milo was alive? he answered him, that in three, or at most in four days, he would be dead. And this saying of his Favonius immediately reported to Marcus Cato, who is here present. [cap.10] [27]
In the meantime, as Clodius knew—and it was not hard to know it—that Milo was forced to take a yearly, legitimate, necessary journey on the twentieth of January to Lanuvium to appoint a priest,[7] because Milo was dictator of Lanuvium, on a sudden he himself left Rome the day before, in order (as was seen by the event) to lay an ambush for Milo in front of his farm; and he departed, so that he was not present at a turbulent assembly in which his madness was greatly missed, and which was held that very day, and from which he never would have been absent if he had not desired to avail himself of the place and opportunity for a crime.