[102]
And will the dignity of the Roman people, O priests, be able to support this
stain of infamy and inconsistency, while the senate live, while you are the
chief man of the public council, if the house of Marcus Tullius Cicero
appears joined with the house of Fulvius Flaccus by the memory of a
punishment publicly inflicted? Marcus Flaccus because he had acted with
Caius Gracchus in a manner opposed to the safety of the republic, was put to
death by the sentence of the senate, and his house was destroyed and
confiscated, and on the spot Quintus Catulus some time after erected a
portico out of the spoils of the Cimbri. But that firebrand and fury of his
country, when, under those great generals Piso and Gabinius, he had taken
the city, and occupied, and was in entire possession of it, destroyed the
memorials of a most illustrious man who was dead, and united my house with
the house of Marcus Flaccus, in order that he, after he had crushed the
senate, might inflict on him whom the conscript fathers had pronounced to be
the saviour of his country, the same punishment which the senate had
inflicted on the destroyer of the constitution.
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.