[47]
I do not
doubt, though there was no feeling of humanity ever in you, no regard for holiness,
still that now in your fear and danger thoughts of your wicked actions occurred to
you. Can there be any comfortable hope of safety cherished by you, when you
recollect how impious, how wicked, how blasphemous has been your conduct towards the
immortal gods? Did you dare to plunder the Delian Apollo? Did you dare to lay
impious and sacrilegious hands on that temple, so ancient, so venerated, so holy? If
you were not in your childhood taught and framed to learn and know what has been
committed to writing, still would you not afterwards, when you came into the very
places themselves, learn and believe what is handed down both by tradition and by
documents:
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. 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.