you take my advice. For it is not in these matters alone that he has shown himself to be such a man as you know and have seen him to be, but briefly in all undertakings which he has ever attempted to perform for the commonwealth. [-26-] "His private life and his private examples of licentiousness and avarice I shall willingly pass over, not because one would fail to discover that he had committed many abominable outrages in the course of them, but because, by Hercules, I am ashamed to describe minutely and separately--especially to you who know it as well as I--how he conducted his youth among you who were boys at the time, how he auctioned off the vigor of his prime, his secret lapses from chastity, his open fornications, what he let be done to him as long as it was possible, what he did as early as he could, his revels, his periods of drunkenness, and all the rest that follows in their train. It is impossible for a person brought up in so great licentiousness and shamelessness to avoid defiling his entire life: and so from his private concerns he brought his lewdness and greed to bear upon public matters. On this I will refrain from dilating, and likewise by Jupiter on his visit to Gabinius in Egypt and his flight to Caesar in Gaul, that I may not be charged with going minutely into every detail; for I feel ashamed for you, that knowing him to be such a man you appointed him tribune and master of the horse and subsequently consul. I will at present recite only his drunken insolence and abuses in these very positions.