1Therefore, judges, to come at last to the case and the charge, if neither is every confession of a deed unusual, nor has anything been decided by the senate about our case otherwise than we would have wished, and if the proposer of the law himself, though there was no dispute about the deed, still wished there to be a debate on the right, and if judges have been chosen, and a man put in charge of the inquiry who will decide these questions justly and wisely, it remains, judges, that you should now inquire into nothing else but which of the two laid an ambush for the other. 1And so that you may perceive this more easily from the evidence, please pay careful attention while I briefly set out for you what happened.
24Publius Clodius, having resolved to harass the state with every kind of crime in his praetorship, and seeing that the elections had been so delayed the year before that he could not hold the praetorship for many months — since he did not look to the step in office, as others do, but wished both to escape having Lucius Paullus, a citizen of singular virtue, as his colleague, and was seeking a full year for tearing the state to pieces — suddenly abandoned his own year and transferred himself to the next, not, as happens, from some religious scruple, but in order to have, as he himself used to say, a full and complete year for holding the praetorship, that is, for overthrowing the state.
25It occurred to him that his praetorship would be maimed and crippled with Milo as consul; 25and he saw, moreover, that Milo was being made consul with the overwhelming consent of the Roman people. 25He went over to Milo's rivals, but in such a way that he alone steered the whole canvass, even against their will, and carried the whole election, as he kept saying, on his own shoulders. 25He called the tribes together, thrust himself in as go-between, and enrolled a new Colline tribe by a levy of the most abandoned citizens. 25The more confusion he stirred up, the stronger Milo grew day by day. 25When that man, so ready for every crime, saw that the bravest of men, his bitterest enemy, was most certain to be consul, and realised that this had often been declared not only in the talk but also in the votes of the Roman people, he began to act openly and to say plainly that Milo must be killed.
26He had brought down from the Apennines rustic and barbarous slaves, with whom he had ravaged the public forests and harassed Etruria; you used to see them. 26The matter was by no means obscure. 26Indeed he kept saying openly that the consulship could not be taken from Milo, but his life could. 26He hinted at this often in the senate, and said it in the assembly; 26indeed, when Marcus Favonius, a very brave man, asked him what hope fed his madness while Milo was alive, he replied that within three or at most four days Milo would be dead; 26and Favonius at once reported this remark of his to Marcus Cato here.