[179]
For myself, even though I were not to say it myself, who is there who is not aware
how far it is necessary for me to proceed? Will it be possible for me to be silent,
O Hortensius? Will it be possible for me to dissemble, when the republic has
received so severe a wound, that, though I pleaded the cause, our provinces will
appear to have been pillaged, our allies oppressed, the immortal gods plundered,
Roman citizens tortured and murdered with impunity? Will it be possible for me
either to lay this burden on the shoulders of this tribunal, or any longer to endure
it in silence? Must not the matter be agitated? must it not be brought publicly
forward? Must not the good faith of the Roman people be implored? Must not all who
have implicated themselves in such wickedness as to allow their good faith to be
tampered with, or to give a corrupt decision, be summoned before the court, and made
to encounter a public trial?
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.