may condemn as being unbecoming one so old, who should have been taught equanimity by experience; but pusillanimity and pretence will not be the offences you will bring against him. Antony, not finding that Cicero had come at his call, declared in the Senate that he would send his workmen to dig him out from his house. Cicero alludes to this on the next day without passion.[196] Antony was not present, and in this speech he expresses no bitterness of anger. It should hardly have been named one of the Philippics, which title might well have been commenced with the second. The name, it should be understood, has been adopted from a jocular allusion by Cicero to the Philippics of Demosthenes, made in a letter to Brutus. We have at least the reply of Brutus, if indeed the letter be genuine, which is much to be doubted.[197] But he had no purpose of affixing his name to them. For many years afterward they were called Antonianae, and the first general use of the term by which we know them has probably been comparatively modern. The one name does as well as another, but it is odd that speeches from Demosthenes should have given a name to others so well known as these made by Cicero against Antony. Plutarch, however, mentions the name, saying that it had been given to the speeches by Cicero himself. In this, the first, he is ironically reticent as to Antony's violence and unpatriotic conduct. Antony was not present, and Cicero tells his hearers with a pleasant joke that to Antony it may be allowed to be absent on the score of ill-health, though the indulgence had been refused to him. Antony is his friend, and why had Antony treated him so roughly? Was it unusual for Senators to be absent? Was Hannibal at the gate, or were they dealing for peace with Pyrrhus, as was the case when they brought the old blind Appius down to the House? Then he comes to the question of the hour, which was, nominally, the sanctioning as law those acts of Caesar's which he had decreed by his own will before his death. When a tyrant usurps power for a while and is then deposed, no more difficult question can be debated. Is it not better to take the law as he leaves it, even though the law has become a law illegally, than encounter all the confusion of retrograde action? Nothing could have been more iniquitous than some of Sulla's laws, but Cicero had opposed their abrogation. But here the question was one not of Caesar's laws, but of decrees subsequently made by Antony and palmed off upon the people as having been found among Caesar's papers. Soon after Caesar's death a decision had been obtained by Antony in favor of Caesar's laws or acts, and hence had come these impudent forgeries under the guise of which Antony could cause what writings he chose to be made public. "I think that Caesar's acts should be maintained," says Cicero, "not as being in themselves good, for that no one can assert. I wish that Antony were