This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
Table of Contents:


[7]
And you, O conscript
fathers, if you abandon and betray Marcus Brutus, what citizen in the world will
you ever distinguish? Whom will you ever favor? Unless, indeed, you think that
those men who put a diadem on a man's head deserve to be preserved, and those
who have abolished the very name of kingly power deserve to be abandoned. And of
this divine and immortal glory of Marcus Brutus I will say no more; it is
already embalmed in the grateful recollection of all the citizens, but it has
not yet been sanctioned by any formal act of public authority. Such patience! O
ye good gods! such moderation! such tranquillity and submission under injury! A
man who, while he was praetor of the city, was driven from the city, was
prevented from sitting as judge in legal proceedings, when it was he who had
restored all law to the republic; and, though he might have been hedged round by
the daily concourse of all virtuous men, who were constantly flocking round him
in marvelous numbers, he preferred to be defended in his absence by the judgment
of the good, to being present and protected by their force;—who was
not even present to celebrate the games to Apollo, which had been prepared in a
manner suitable to his own dignity and to that of the Roman people, lest he
should open any road to the audacity of most wicked men.
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.