previous next

[15] Next to that I ask you whether you kept your promise in that particular? Did the fact of your knowing that on that day the heavens had been observed, delay, or not delay your summoning the council, and proposing your intended law? And since this is the one thing which you say belongs to you in common with Caesar, I will separate you from him, not only for the sake of the republic, but also for the sake of Caesar, lest any stain from your extraordinary infamy should seem to attach itself to his dignity. First of all, I ask you whether you trust your case to the senate, as Caesar does? Next, what sort of authority that man has who defends himself by the conduct of another and not by his own? Next (for my real sentiments will at times burst forth, and I cannot help saying without circumlocution what I feel,) even if Caesar had been rather violent in any particular, if the importance of the contest and anxiety for glory, and his eminent courage, and his admirable nobility of character had carried him away at all, which would have been endurable in that great man, and would have deserved to be obliterated from our minds by the mighty exploits which he has subsequently performed, will you, you wretch, assume the same privilege to yourself, and is the voice of Vatinius, the thief and sacrilegious man, to be heard, demanding that the same indulgence is to be allowed to him that is allowed to Caesar? For this is what I ask of you.


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.

Creative Commons License
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.

load focus Latin (Albert Clark, 1909)
hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide References (12 total)
  • Cross-references to this page (9):
    • A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities (1890), FUNUS
    • A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities (1890), GLADIATO´RES
    • A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities (1890), LEGA´TUS
    • A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities (1890), LEX
    • A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities (1890), LUDI
    • A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities (1890), SENATUS
    • A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities (1890), TRIBUS
    • Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography (1854), MARSI
    • Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography (1854), PELIGNI
  • Cross-references in general dictionaries to this page (3):
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: