[76]
Think not, O judges, that that violence and that attempt was the work of human beings; for
no nation ever was so barbarous or so savage, as to have (I will not say so many, but even)
one implacable enemy to his country. They were some savage and ferocious beasts, born of
monsters, and clothed in human form. Look again and again, O judges; for there is nothing too
violent to be said in such a cause as this. Look deeply and thoroughly into the minds of
Catiline, Autronius, Cethegus, Lentulus, and the rest. What lusts you will find in these men,
what crimes, what baseness, what audacity, what incredible insanity, what marks of wickedness,
what traces of parricide, what heaps of enormous guilt! Out of the great diseases of the
republic, diseases of long standing, which had been given over as hopeless, suddenly that
violence broke out in such a way, that when it was put down and got rid of, the state might
again be able to become convalescent and to be cured; for there is no one who thinks that if
those pests remained in the republic, the Constitution could continue to exist any longer.
Therefore they were some Furies who urged them on, not to complete their wickedness, but to
atone to the republic for their guilt by their punishment.
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, B. A. London. Henry G. Bohn, York Street, Covent Garden. 1856.
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.