[69]
See, now, how various and changeable is the course of human
life,—how fickle and full of revolutions is fortune; what
instances of perfidy are seen in friends, how they dissemble and suit their
behaviour to the occasion; when dangers beset one, how one's nearest
connections fly off, and what cowardice they show. The time will come, yes,
will most certainly come,—that day will surely dawn some time or
other, when you, though your affairs are all, as I trust they will be, in a
really sound condition, though they may, perhaps, wear an altered appearance
in consequence of some commotion of the times, such as we are all liable to,
(and how constantly such things happen we may know from
experience,)—when you, I say, may be in need of the good-will of
one who is most deeply attached to you, and the good faith of a man of the
greatest weight and dignity, and the magnanimity of the very bravest man
that ever lived in the world.
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.