This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
[115]
Recollect then, O Marcus Antonius, that day on which you abolished the
dictatorship. Set before you the joy of the senate and people of Rome; compare it with this infamous market
held by you and by your friends; and then you will understand how great is the
difference between praise and profit. But in truth, just as some people, through
some disease which has blunted the senses, have no conception of the niceness of
food, so men who are lustful, avaricious, and criminal, have no taste for true
glory. But if praise can not allure you to act rightly, still can not even fear
turn you away from the most shameful actions? You are not afraid of the courts
of justice. If it is because you are innocent, I praise you; if because you
trust in your power of overbearing them by violence, are you ignorant of what
that man has to fear, who on such an account as that does not fear the courts of
justice?
M. Tullius Cicero. The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, literally translated by C. D. Yonge. London. George Bell & Sons. 1903.
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.