the Great was submitted to the pitiless voice of the auctioneer. On that one occasion the state forgot its slavery, and groaned aloud; and tho men's minds were enslaved, as everything was kept under by fear, still the groans of the Roman people were free. While all men were waiting to see who would be so impious, who would be so mad, who would be so declared an enemy to gods and to men as to dare to mix himself up with that wicked auction, no one was found except Antonius, even tho there were plenty of men collected round that spear[1] who would have dared anything else. One man alone was found to dare to do that which the audacity of every one else had shrunk from and shuddered at. Were you, then, seized with such stupidity—or, I should rather say, with such insanity—as not to see that if you, being of the rank in which you were born, acted as a broker at all, and above all as a broker in the case of Pompeius's property, you would be execrated and hated by the Roman people, and that all gods and all men must at once become and forever continue hostile to you? But with what violence did that glutton immediately proceed to take possession of the property of that man, to whose valor it had been owing that the Roman people had been more
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- ↑ Mr. Yonge observes that the custom of erecting a spear wherever an auction was held is well known; it is said to have arisen from the ancient practise of selling under a spear the booty acquired in war.
