[64]
If any chance, O Cato, had conducted endowed with your existing natural disposition to those
tutors, you would not indeed have been a better man than you are, not a braver one, nor more
temperate, nor more just than you are, (for that is not possible,) but you would have been a
little more inclined to lenity; you would not when you were not induced by any enmity, or
provoked by any personal injury, accuse a most virtuous man, a man of the highest rank and the
greatest integrity; you would consider that as fortune had entrusted the guardianship of the
same year to you 1 and to Murena, that you
were connected with him by some certain political union; and the severe things which you have
said in the senate you would either not have said, or you would have guarded against their
being applied to him, or you would have interpreted them in the mildest sense.
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1 Cato was tribune elect.
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