[20]
Here also I ask, if you had been made augur, as you were
anxious to be, the bare idea of which on your part caused us, who hated you,
a pain which we could hardly endure, while they who were your intimate
friends could scarcely forbear laughing at it; still I ask, I say, if in
addition to the other wounds under which you believed the republic to be
sinking, you had added the deadly and fatal blow of your augurship, would
you have decreed that which every augur ever since the time of Romulus has
invariably decreed, that when Jupiter was sending forth his lightning it was impious to
transact business with the people; or, because you had constantly done so,
would you as augur have put an end to the system of taking auspices altogether?
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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.
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