[44]
Grant that those achievements of his are great things,
as in truth they are; every one else may agree with my opinion or not, as he
pleases, for I, amid all his power and all his good-fortune, prefer this
liberality of his towards his friends, and his recollection of old
friendship, to all the rest of his virtues. And you, O judges, ought not
only not to despise or to regret this goodness of so novel a kind, so
unusual in illustrious and preeminently powerful men, but even to embrace
and increase it and so much the more, because you see that these days have
been taken for the purpose of, as it were, undermining his
dignity; from which nothing can be taken which be will not either bravely
bear, or easily replace. But if he hears that his dearest friend has been
stripped of his honourable position, that he will not endure without just
indignation; and yet he will not have lost what he can have no possible hope
of ever recovering.
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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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