previous next

[11]

I, when a boy, have heard my father say this. When Quintus Metellus, the son of Lucius, was prosecuted for extortion and peculation, he, that man to whom the safety of his country was dearer than the sight of it, who had rather abandon his city than his opinion; when he, I say, was before the court, and when his account-books were being carried round to the judges that they might see the entry of one item, I have heard that there was not one judge among them Roman knights, most excellent men as they were, who did not avert his eyes, and turn himself altogether away, lest any one of them should appear for a moment to have doubted whether what such a man had entered in his public accounts was true or false. And shall we open the question of the legality of a decree of Cnaeus Pompeius, pronounced in accordance with the vote of the senate? Shall we compare it with the words of the laws? with the treaties? Shall we scrutinise everything with the most unfriendly minuteness?


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 (7 total)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: