[14]
For if I had not persuaded myself from my
youth upwards, both by the precepts of many masters and by much reading, that there is nothing
in life greatly to be desired, except praise and honour, and that while pursuing those things
all tortures of the body, all dangers of death and banishment are to be considered but of
small importance, I should never have exposed myself, in defence of your safety, to such
numerous and arduous contests, and to these daily attacks of profligate men. But all books are
full of such precepts, and all the sayings of philosophers, and all antiquity is full of
precedents teaching the same lesson; but all these things would lie buried in darkness, if the
light of literature and learning were not applied to them. How many images of the bravest men,
carefully elaborated, have both the Greek and Latin writers bequeathed to us, not merely for
us to look at and gaze upon, but also for our imitation! And I, always keeping them before my
eyes as examples for my own public conduct, have endeavoured to model my mind and views by
continually thinking of those excellent men.
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.