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

And is not even that oration, which is the first which I made in the senate after my return, a proof that I am saying nothing new now,—nothing just to meet the emergency? For as in that I returned thanks to very few by name, because it was quite impossible to enumerate all those who had served me, (and it would have been a crime to press over any one,) and because I had therefore laid down a rule for myself to name those men only who had been the leaders and standard-bearers as it were in our cause; still among them I returned thanks to Plancius by name. Let the oration be read—which, on account of the importance of the business was pronounced from a written paper, in which I, cunning fellow that I must have been, gave myself up to a man to whom I was under no very great obligation and bound myself to the slavery of this duty which I am now discharging by this undying testimony against myself. I do not wish to recite the other things which I committed to writing. I pass them over, that I may not seem to bring them up now on this emergency, or to avail myself of that description of learning which appears to be more suitable to my private studies than to the usages of courts of justice.