realise that by your irresolute decrees you are losing your prestige, he his fear. And naturally enough, for since his robberies have made him consul, his acts of sedition have given him a province and an army, what might he not have gained by good conduct, when you have rewarded his crimes so generously?
But perhaps it is those who up to the very last have voted for embassies, for peace, for harmony, and the like, that have won his favour. Nay, despised, held unworthy of a share in the state, they are regarded as plunder, since fear makes them sue for peace, which fear had made them lose. For my own part, at the very outset, when I saw Etruria conspiring, the proscribed recalled, and the state rent asunder[1] by bribery, I thought that there was no time to be lost and with a few others I followed the standard of Catulus. But those who lauded the great deeds of the Aemilian family, and the clemency which had made the Roman people great, said that even then Lepidus had taken no decisive step, although he had taken up arms on his own responsibility to crush out liberty; and thus while seeking power or protection for themselves each of them perverted the public counsels.
At that time, however, Lepidus was a mere brigand at the head of a few camp-followers and cut-throats, any one of whom would have sold his life for a day's wages[2]; now he is a proconsul with military power which he did not buy, but which you gave him, with subordinates who are still[3] bound by law to obey him; the most vicious characters of every class flock to his standard, inflamed by poverty
