[30]
Grant that there may be enmity between you; which, however, there ought not
to be; for it was king Deiotarus who raised your family, when abject and
obscure, from darkness into light. Who ever heard of your father, or who he
was, before they heard whose son-in-law he was? But even supposing you
repudiated the name of the connection with ever so much ingratitude and
impiety, still you might have conducted your quarrel like a man, and not
pursue him with a false accusation, not seek his life, not prosecute him on
a capital charge. Be it so:—let even this excess of bitterness and
hatred be permitted. Was it to go to such an extent that all the laws of
ordinary life and of common safety, and even of humanity, are to be
violated? to tamper with slaves by words, to corrupt them by hopes and
promises; to lead them away to your own house, to arm them against their
master, to wage an impious war not against one relation, but against every
family in the world? For that corruption of slaves, if it be not only
unpunished, but even approved by such a great authority as that of this
tribunal, no walls, no laws, no rights will be sufficient for the protection
of our safety. For when that which is in our houses and is our own can sally
out with impunity and fight against us, slavery then gets the mastery, and
the master's position is slavery.
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.