[72]
Did you then, O you most monstrous pest, dare to call that man an exile, when
you yourself were branded with such wickedness and such crimes that you made
every place which you approached very like a place of banishment? For what
is an exile? The name itself is an indication of misfortune, not of
disgrace. When, then, is it disgraceful? In reality when it is the
punishment of guilt; but in the opinion of men, when it is the punishment of
a condemned person. Is it then owing to any crime of mine that I hear the
name of an exile, or owing to any judicial sentence? Owing to any crime?
Even you, whom those satellites of yours call the prosperous Catiline, do
not dare to affirm that, nor do any one of those men who used to say so,
venture to say so now. There is not only no one so ignorant now as to say
that those actions which I did in my consulship were errors; but no one is
such an enemy to his country as not to confess that the country was
preserved by my counsels.
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. George Bell & Sons, York Street, Covent Garden. 1891.
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.