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19“I propose, now, to leave this subject and to return to the point where I started. Well then, when Antony, against whom he has inveighed, saw that Caesar was becoming exalted above our government, caused him, by means of the very proposals which were supposed to gratify him, not to put into effect any of the projects he had in mind. 2For nothing so diverts persons from purposes which they cherish a wrongful desire to achieve and can put into effect, as for those who fear that they may have to submit to such things to pretend that they endure them of their own choice. 3For these persons in authority, being conscious of their own wrongful purposes, do not trust the sincerity of the others, and believing that they have been detected, are ashamed and afraid, construing to the opposite effect, in their distrust, what is said to them, counting it mere flattery, and regarding with suspicion, in their shame, the possible outcome of what is said, as if it were a plot. 4It was of course because Antony knew this thoroughly that he first of all selected the Lupercalia and its procession, in order that Caesar in the relaxation of his spirit and merriment of the occasion might with safety be rebuked, and that, in the next place, he selected the Forum and the rostra, that Caesar might be made ashamed by the very places. 5And he fabricated the commands from the populace, in order that Caesar, hearing them, might reflect, not on all that Antony was saying at the time, but on all that the Roman people would order a man to say. For how could he have believed that this injunction had been laid upon any one, when he neither knew of the people’s having voted anything of the kind nor heard them shouting their applause? 6But, in fact, it was necessary for him to hear this in the Roman Forum, where we have often joined in many deliberations for freedom, and beside the rostra, from which we have sent forth thousands upon thousands of measures on behalf of the republic, and at the festival of the Lupercalia, in order that he might be reminded of Romulus, and from the lips of the consul, that he might call to mind the deeds of the early consuls, 7and in the name of the people, that he might ponder the fact that he was undertaking to be tyrant, not over Africans or Gauls or Egyptians, but over very Romans. These words brought him to himself, they humiliated him; and whereas, if any one else had offered him the diadem, he might perhaps have taken it, as it was, through the influence of all these associations, he checked himself; he shuddered and felt afraid.
8“Here, then, you have the deeds of Antony; he did not break a leg in a vain attempt to make his own escape, nor burn off a hand in order to frighten Porsenna, but by his cleverness and consummate skill, which were of more avail than the spear of Decius or the sword of Brutus, he put an end to the tyranny of Caesar.
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