8.
[17]
But I come back now to that splendid harangue of yours. You are the man who
disapprove of cruelty, are you? you who, when the senate had decided on
displaying its grief and indignation by a change of their garments, and when
you saw that the whole republic was grieving in the mourning of its most
honourable order, you, O merciful man, what do you do? Why,
what no tyrant in any country of barbarians ever dreamt of. For, I say
nothing of the fact of a consul issuing an edict, that the senate should not
obey a resolution of the senate; an action than which none more shameful can
either be done or imagined. I return to the merciful disposition of that
man, who thinks that the senate were over cruel in preserving the country.
[18]
He with his mate—whom
however he was desirous to surpass in all vices—dared to issue an
edict that the senate should return to its usual dress contrary to the
resolution which that body itself had passed. What tyrant in any part of
Scythia ever behaved in such a
way as not to permit those men to mourn whom he was loading with misery? You
leave them their grief, you take away the emblems of grief, you take away
their tears not by comforting them but by threatening them. But even if the
conscript fathers had changed their attire not in consequence of any public
resolution, but out of private affection or pity still it would have been an
intolerable stretch of power that your interdict should prohibit them from
doing so; but when the senate in a full house had passed a resolution to
that effect, and all the other orders in the state had already changed their
attire, then you, a consul, dragged out of a dark dirty cookshop, with that
shaved dancing girl of yours, forbade the senate of the Roman people to
mourn for the setting and death of the republic.
This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
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.