[46]
This is
what I have always wished respecting you, this is what I have desired, this
is what I have prayed for. Even more has happened than I could have desired.
For, in truth, I never formed a wish that you should lose your armies. That
has happened quite beyond my wish, though I cannot say that it
has grieved me; but it never could have occurred to me to wish you the
insanity and frenzy into which you have both fallen. Still it might well
have been wished. But I had forgotten that that was the most invariable of
all the punishments which were appointed by the immortal gods for wicked and
impious men.
For think not, O conscript fathers, that, as you see on the stage, wicked men
are, by the instigation of the gods, terrified by the blazing torches of the
Furies. It is his own dishonesty, his own crime, his own wickedness, his own
audacity that deprives each individual of sense and discernment. These are
the Furies, these the flames, these the firebrands which distress the
impious.
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