[112]
Did you dare to take away out of Enna the statue of Ceres?
Did you attempt at Enna to wrench Victory
out of the hand of Ceres? to tear one
goddess from the other?—nothing of which those men dared to violate, or
even to touch, whose qualities were all more akin to wickedness than to religion.
For while Publius Popillius and Publius Rupilius were consuls, slaves, runaway
slaves, and barbarians, and enemies, were in possession of that place; but yet the
slaves ware not so much slaves to their own masters, as you are to your passions;
nor did the runaways flee from their masters as far as you flee from all laws and
from all right; nor were the barbarians as barbarous in language and in race as you
were in your nature and your habits; nor were the enemies as much enemies to men as
you are to the immortal gods. How, then, can a man beg for any mercy who has
surpassed slaves in baseness, runaway slaves in rashness, barbarians in wickedness,
and enemies in inhumanity?
This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
M. Tullius Cicero. The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, literally translated by C. D. Yonge. London. George Bell & Sons. 1903.
The National Endowment for the Humanities provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.