[33]
We lately had a most audacious man in this city, Caius Fimbria, a man, as is well known
among all except among those who are mad themselves, utterly insane. He, when at the
funeral of Caius Marius, had contrived that Quintus Scaevola, the most venerable and
accomplished man in our city, should be wounded;—(a man in whose praise there
is neither room to say much here, nor indeed is it possible to say more than the Roman
people preserves in its recollection)—he, I say, brought an accusation against
Scaevola, when he found that he might possibly live. When the question was asked him,
what he was going to accuse that man of, whom no one could praise in a manner
sufficiently suitable to his worth, they say that the man, like a madman as he was,
answered, for not having received the whole weapon in his body. A more lamentable thing
was never seen by the Roman people, unless it were the death of that same man, which was
so important that it crushed and broke the hearts of all his fellow-citizens; for
endeavouring to save whom by an arrangement, he was destroyed by them. 1
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1 Scaevola was trying to effect an accommodation between the parties of Sulla and Marius when he was murdered by them.
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