[17]
Did you think that you were consul at Capua, a city where there was once the abode of
arrogance, or at Rome, where all the consuls that ever existed before you were obedient to the
senate? Did you dare, when you were brought forward in the Flaminian Circus, with your
colleague, to say that you had always been merciful? by which expression you declared that the
senate and all virtuous men were cruel at the time that I warded off ruin from the republic.
You were a merciful man when you handed me over,—me, your own
relation,—me, whom at your comitia you had appointed as
chief guardian of the prerogative tribe, whose opinions on the calends of January you had
asked then, bound and helpless to the enemies of the republic! You repelled my son-in-law,
your own kinsman; you repelled your own near relation, my daughter, with most haughty and
inhuman language, from your knees; and you, also, O man of singular mercy and clemency, when
I, together with the republic, had fallen, not by a blow aimed by a tribune, but by a wound
inflicted by a consul, behaved with such wickedness and such intemperance, that you did not
allow one single hour to elapse between the time of my disaster and your plunder; you did not
allow even time for the lamentations and groans of the city to die away.
This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
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.