M. Tullius Cicero, For Plancius
C. D. Yonge, Ed.

You ask also, O Laterensis, what answer you can make to the images of your ancestors; how you are to excuse yourself to that most accomplished and excellent man your deceased father? Never think about those things. Take care rather lest that querulousness and excessive grief of yours be reproved by those men of consummate wisdom. For your father saw that Appius Claudius a most noble man, even in the lifetime of his own father a most influential and most illustrious citizen, Caius Claudius, failed in his endeavour to obtain the aedileship, and yet that he was afterwards elected consul without a repulse. He saw that a man most closely connected with himself a most illustrious citizen, Lucius Volcatius, and he saw that Marcus Piso too, having both sustained a slight defeat in the matter of the aedileship, received afterwards the very highest honours from the Roman people. But your grandfather could tell you also of the rejection of Publius Nasica, when he stood for the aedileship, though I am sure that a greater citizen has never existed in this republic, and of Caius Marius too, who was twice rejected when a candidate for the aedileship, and yet was seven times made consul, and of Lucius Caesar and of Cnaeus Octavius and of Marcus Tullius, every one of whom we know were beaten for the aedileship, and were elected consul afterwards.