Antony was highly incensed at this speech, and summoned another meeting of the Senate, at which he again required the presence of Cicero. These two rivals seem to have been destined never to meet in the Senate-house. Cicero, being apprehensive of some design against his life, did not attend; so that the Oration of Antony, in his own justification, which he had carefully prepared in intervals of leisure at his villa, near Tibur, was unanswered in the Senate. The second Philippic was penned by Cicero in his closet, as a reply to this speech of Antony, in which he had been particularly charged with having been not merely accessary to the murder of Cæsar, but the chief contriver of the plot against him. Some part of Cicero’s oration was thus necessarily defensive, but the larger portion, which is accusatory, is one of the severest and most bitter invectives ever composed, the whole being expressed in terms of the most thorough contempt and strongest detestation of Antony. By laying open his whole criminal excesses from his earliest youth, he exhibits one continued scene of debauchery, faction, rapine, and violence; but he dwells with peculiar horror on his offer of the diadem to Cæsar, at the festival of the Lupercalia—his drunken debauch at the once classic villa of Terentius Varro—and his purchase of the effects that belonged to the great Pompey—on which last subject he pathetically contrasts the modesty and decorum of that renowned warrior, once the Favourite of Fortune, and darling of the Roman people, with the licentiousness of the military adventurer who now rioted in the spoils of his country. In concluding, he declares, on his own part, that in his youth he had defended the republic, and, in his old age, he would not abandon its cause.—“The sword of Catiline I despised; and never shall I dread that of Antony.” This oration is adorned with all the charms of eloquence, and proves, that in the decline of life Cicero had not lost one spark of the fire and spirit which animated his earlier productions. Although not delivered in the Senate, nor intended to be published till things were actually come to an extremity, and the affairs of the republic made it necessary to render Antony’s conduct and designs manifest to the people, copies of the oration were sent to Brutus, Cassius, and other friends of the commonwealth: hence it soon got into extensive circulation, and, by exciting the vengeance of Antony, was a chief cause of the tragical death of its author.