[14]
For what severer punishment could befall any one, in whom there exists, if
not any respect for his reputation, at all events some fear of punishment,
than to have those letters of theirs utterly disbelieved which announced
that the republic had been very successful in war? The senate decided this,
when in a very full house it refused Gabinius a supplication; they decided,
in the first place, that no belief at all could be given to a man polluted
with every sort of guilt and wickedness; and, secondly, that the affairs of
the republic could not possibly be managed successfully by a traitor,
especially by that man who was known to be at the time an enemy of the
republic; and, lastly, that even the immortal gods themselves did not choose
their temples to be thrown open, and supplications to be addressed to them
in the name of a most profligate and wicked man.
Therefore, that other man is either himself a learned man, and one well
instructed by his Greek slaves, with whom he now sups behind the scenes, as
he used to do before the curtain, or else he has wiser friends than
Gabinius, from whom no letters are produced.
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.