[70]
Survey for a moment in
your mind's eye, O judges, (to say nothing of other instances,) these very men who were
implicated in this wickedness. Catiline conspired against the republic. Whose ears were ever
unwilling to believe in this attempt on the part of a man who had spent his whole life, from
his boyhood upwards, not only in intemperance and debauchery, but who had devoted all his
energies and all his zeal to every sort of enormity, and lust, and bloodshed? Who marveled
that that man died fighting against his country, whom all men had always thought born for
civil war? Who is there that recollects the way in which Lentulus was a partner it of
informers or the insanity of his caprices or his perverse and impious superstition, who can
wonder that he cherished either wicked designs, or insane hopes? Who even thinks of Caius
Cethegus and his expedition into Spain and the wound inflicted on Quintus Metellus Pius
without seeing that a prison was built on purpose to be the scene of his punishment?
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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.
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