This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
[8]
But if, O conscript fathers, you would only recollect the excuses alleged by
Servius Sulpicius why he should not be appointed to this embassy, then no doubt
will be left on your minds that we ought to repair by the honor paid to the dead
the injury which we did to him while living. For it is you, O conscript fathers
(it is a grave charge to make, but it must be uttered), it is you, I say, who
have deprived Servius Sulpicius of life. For when you saw him pleading his
illness as an excuse more by the truth of the fact than by any labored plea of
words, you were not indeed cruel (for what can be more impossible for this order
to be guilty of than that), but as you hoped that there was nothing that could
not be accomplished by his authority and wisdom, you opposed his excuse with
great earnestness, and compelled the man, who had always thought your decisions
of the greatest weight, to abandon his own opinion.
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.