"While performing his sacred duties a priest was told he was to be banished and sought refuge," said Eudoxos. "Too late! Before he could cross the sill of the Tribunal, a centurion stabbed him."
Lycon declared that mothers, to save themselves, shut their doors against their own sons who were suspected of treason; that daughters did not hesitate to tell where their fathers were concealed.
Even little children, according to another, were no longer safe. One child, on its way to school, had been seized by an executioner and slaughtered before the eyes of its parents.
"Remember, above all else, the brutal assassination of Cicero," cried the rhetorician, Antipus, who had made a journey to Rome expressly to hear the voice of that great orator.
"That was an unpardonable crime," agreed one of his colleagues, "and it will leave a lasting stain on the name of Mark Antony!"
Apollodorus, who the moment before had been praising the latter, in order to protect the Queen, now tried to throw the odium of this assassination on Octavius. He was chiefly to blame; the friend of Cicero, he, like a white-livered coward, and without a single qualm, had given Cicero into the hands of the murderers. He whom, only a few days before, Cicero had pressed to his heart and called his son!
A shiver of disgust ran around the table as though a serpent had appeared in the room. Again the talk turned on Mark Antony. In spite of his misdoings, he at least, with the coarse tunic that he put on when he went to drink with the soldiers and the women of the town, with his sword slung over his shoulder and his chariot drawn by lions, accompanied by the courtesan Cytheris, was amusing. A voice was even heard praising him, for a brave man will always find someone to stand up for him.
The philosopher, Lycon, though a professed cynic, recalled that at the moment when the conspirators were still waving their swords, when Octavius was in hiding, and when terror prevailed throughout Rome, Mark Antony had had the courage to insist on a proper funeral for Cæsar and had stood before the body of his benefactor and fearlessly proclaimed his virtues.
But this praise aroused little enthusiasm. The group of distinguished men of letters had no interest in a boor like Antony whose valour was simply that of the battle-field.