[87]
I swear to you, the fortune of the Roman people appeared to me hard and
cruel, while it for so many years beheld and endured that man triumphing
over the republic. He had polluted the holiest religious observances with
his debauchery; he had broken the most authoritative decrees of the senate
he had openly bought himself from the judges with money; he had harassed the
senate in his tribuneship; he had rescinded acts which had been passed for
the sake of the safety of the republic, by the consent of all orders of the
state; he had driven me from my country; he had plundered my property; he
had burnt my house; he had ill-treated my children and my wife; he had
declared a wicked war against Cnaeus Pompeius; he had made slaughter of
magistrates and private individuals; he had burnt the house of my brother;
he had laid waste Etruria; he had driven numbers of men from their homes and
their professions. He kept pursuing and oppressing men; the whole state, all
Italy, all the provinces, all foreign kingdoms could not contain his frenzy.
Laws were already being drawn up in his house which were to hand us over to
the power of our slaves. There was nothing belonging to any one, which he
had taken a fancy to, which he did not think would become his in the course
of this year.
This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
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.