Book 5
28
And when speaking of this, I must not omit the admirable and singular diligence of this great general. For know that there is no town in all Sicily of those in which the praetors are accustomed to stay and hold their court, in which there was not some woman selected for him out of some respectable family, to gratify his lust. Some of them were even openly present at his banquets. If there were some a little modest, they used to come at the proper time, and avoided the light of day, and the crowd. And these banquets were celebrated, not with the orderly silence of the banquets of praetors and generals of the Roman people, nor with that modesty which is usually found at the entertainments of magistrates, but with the most excessive noise and licence of conversation sometimes even affairs proceeded to blows and fighting. For that strict and diligent praetor, who had never obeyed the laws of the Roman people, observed most carefully those rules which are laid down for drinking parties. And accordingly the ends of these banquets were such that men were often carried out from the feast as from a battle; others were left on the ground as dead; numbers lay prostrate without sense or feeling, so that any one who beheld the scene would have supposed that he was looking not on a banquet of a praetor, but on the battle of Cannae.
