[59]
Therefore, Tigranes—who
was himself an enemy of the Roman people, and who received our most active
enemy in his territories, who struggled against us, who fought pitched
battles with us, and who compelled us to combat almost for our very
existence and supremacy—is a king to this day, and has obtained by
his entreaties the name of a friend and ally, which he had previously
forfeited by his hostile and warlike conduct.
That unhappy king of Cyprus—who was always our ally, always our friend,
concerning whom no single unfavourable suspicion was ever reported to the
senate or to our commanders in those parts—has now, as they say,
while alive and beholding the light, been seized and sold with all his means
of support, and all his royal apparel. Here is a good reason for other kings
thinking their own fortunes stable, when by this example, handed down to
recollection from that fatal year, they see that one tribune and six hundred
journeymen have power to despoil them of all their fortunes, and strip them
of their whole kingdom!
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.