[17]
And in what a way do you try and support
this invention! in a way not only not calculated to win belief, but not even
such as to, give rise to the least suspicion. When, says the prosecutor, you
had come to the Luceian fort, and had turned aside to the palace of the king
your entertainer, there certain place where all those things were arranged
which the king had settled to offer you as presents. To this place he
intended to conduct you on coming out of the bath, before you lay down; for
there were armed men stationed in that very place on purpose to kill you.
This is the charge; this is the reason why a runaway should accuse a
monarch, a slave accuse his master! I, in truth, O Caius Caesar, at the very
beginning, when the cause was originally laid before me, was struck with a
suspicion that Philippus, the physician, one of the king's slaves, who had
been sent with the ambassadors, had been corrupted by that young man. He has
suborned the physician to act as informer, thought I; he will be sure to
invent some accusation of poisoning. Although my conjecture was some way
from the exact truth, it was not much out as to the general principle of the
accusation. What says the physician?
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.