it were a promise that he himself was unable to perform? As, in fact, he has failed to perform many promises made to many people. And a great many more of those promises have been found since his death, than the number of all the services which he conferred on and did to people during all the years that he was alive would amount to.
What law was ever better, more advantageous, more frequently demanded in the best ages of the republic, than the one which forbade the pretorian provinces to be retained more than a year, and the consular provinces more than two? If this law be abrogated, do you think that the acts of Cæsar are maintained? What! are not all the laws of Cæsar respecting judicial proceedings abrogated by the law which has been proposed concerning the third decury? And are you the defenders of the acts of Cæsar who overturn his laws? Unless, indeed, anything which, for the purpose of recollecting it, he entered in a note-book, is to be counted among his acts, and defended, however unjust or useless it may be; and that which he proposed to the people in the comitia centuriata and carried, is not to be accounted one of the acts of Cæsar. But what is that third decury? The decury of centurions, says he. What! was not the judicature open to that order by the Julian Law, and even before that by the Pompeian and Aurelian Laws? The income of the men, says he, was exactly defined. Certainly, not only in the case of a centurion,
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