[118]
These very fathers, whom you see
here, lay on the threshold, and the wretched mothers spent their nights at the door
of the prison, denied the parting embrace of their children, though they prayed for
nothing but to be allowed to receive their son's dying breath. The porter of the
prison, the executioner of the praetor, was there; the death and terror of both
allies and citizens; the lictor Sextius, to whom every groan and every agony of
every one was a certain gain—“To visit him, you must give so
much; to be allowed to take him food into the prison, so much.” No one
refused. “What now, what will you give me to put your son to death at one
blow of my axe? to save him from longer torture? to spare him repeated blows? to
take care that he shall give up the ghost without any sense of pain or
torture?” Even for this object money was given to the lictor.
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M. Tullius Cicero. The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, literally translated by C. D. Yonge. London. George Bell & Sons. 1903.
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