[87]
What torture he suffered when he was bound
naked in the open air, in the rain and in the cold, must be manifest to every body.
Nor did he put an end to this insult and barbarity, till the people and the whole
multitude, moved by the atrocity of his conduct and by pity for his victim,
compelled the senate by their outcries to promise him that statue of Mercury. They
cried out that the immortal gods themselves would avenge the act, and that in the
meantime it was not fit that an innocent man should be murdered. Then the senate
comes to him in a body, and promises him the statue. And so Sopater is taken down
scarcely alive from the statue of Marcellus, to which he had almost become frozen. I
cannot adequately accuse that man if I were to wish to do so; it requires not only
genius, but an extraordinary amount of skill.
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M. Tullius Cicero. The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, literally translated by C. D. Yonge. London. George Bell & Sons. 1903.
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