On this the immortal gods, as I have said before, put into the head of that abandoned and frantic man the idea of laying an ambush for Milo. That pest was not to perish any other way; the republic would never have chastened him by her laws. The senate, I suppose, would have been able to restrain him when praetor. Why, it had not been able to do anything when it tried to restrain him while a private individual. [89] Would the consuls have been vigorous in bridling the praetor? In the first place, if Milo had been slain, he would have had his own consuls. Secondly, what consul would have behaved fearlessly against him as praetor, who remembered that he, when tribune, had offered the most cruel injuries to the virtue of the consuls? He would have oppressed everything; he would have taken possession and held possession of everything. By a new law, the draught of which was found in his house, with the rest of the Clodian laws, he would have made all our slaves his own freedmen. Lastly, if the immortal gods had not inspired him with such ideas that he, an effeminate creature, attempted to slay a most gallant man, you would have no republic at all this day. [90] Would that man when praetor, much more when consul, provided only that these temples and these walls could have stood so long if he had been alive, and could have remained till his consulship; would he, I say, if alive, have done no harm, when even after he was dead he burned the senate-house, one of his satellites, Sextus Clodius, being the ringleader in the tumult? What more miserable, more grievous, more bitter sight have we ever seen than that? that that temple of sanctity, of honour, of wisdom, of the public council, the head of the city, the altar of the allies, the harbour of all nations, the abode granted by the universal Roman people to one of the orders of the state, should be burnt, profaned, and destroyed?[13] and that that should be done, not by an ignorant mob, although that would have been a miserable thing, but by one single person? who, if he dared so much in his character of burner of a dead man, what would he not have done as standard-bearer of a living one? He selected the senate-house, of all the places in the city, to throw him down in, in order that when dead he might burn what he had overturned while alive.