[3]
But when I saw the countenance and heard
the words of this runaway slave, accusing his master,—his absent
master,—his master, who was a most devoted friend to our
republic,—I did not feel so much grief at the depressed condition
of the monarch himself, as fear for the general fortunes of every one. For
though, according to the usage of our ancestors, it is not lawful to examine
a slave as a witness against his master, not even by
torture,—in which mode of examination pain might, perhaps, elicit
the truth from a man even against his will,—a slave has arisen,
who, without any compulsion, accuses him against whom he might not legally
say a word even on the rack.
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.