[12]
What do you say, O you admirable guardian and defender of the province? Did you
dare to snatch from the very jaws of death and to release slaves whom you had
decided were eager to take arms and to make war in Sicily, and whom in accordance with the opinion of your colleagues on
the bench you had sentenced, after they had been already delivered up to punishment
after the manner of our ancestors and had been bound to the stake, in order to
reserve for Roman citizens the cross which you had erected for condemned slaves?
Ruined cities, when their affairs are all desperate, are often accustomed to these
disastrous scenes, to have those who have been condemned restored to their original
position; those who have been bound, released; those who have been banished,
restored; decisions which have been given, rescinded. And when such events take
place, there is no one who is not aware that that state is hastening to its fall.
When such things take place, there is no one who thinks that there is any hope of
safety left.
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.