Saturday, April 07, 2012

Mark Antony Hurls


A busy weekend at a friend's house near New Haven,  so I only have time for a quick gross out.

In his Second Philippic, Cicero paints this charming portrait of a hung over Mark Antony vomiting chunks into his toga at a public meeting in the Forum:
Let us speak rather of his [Mark Antony's] meaner descriptions of worthlessness. You, with those jaws of yours, and those sides of yours, and that strength of body suited to a gladiator, drank such quantities of wine at the marriage of Hippia, that you were forced to vomit the next day in the sight of the Roman people. O action disgraceful not merely to see, but even to hear of! If this had happened to you at supper amid those vast drinking-cups of yours, who would not have thought it scandalous? But in an assembly of the Roman people, a man holding a public office, a master of the horse, to whom it would have been disgraceful even to belch, vomiting filled his own bosom and the whole tribunal with fragments of what he had been eating reeking with wine. But he himself confesses this among his other disgraceful acts. Let us proceed to his more splendid offenses.

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