[91]
Here if the father pledges himself to
pardon him, the dispute falls to the ground. If, on
the other hand, he holds out no hope of pardon,
though he will not necessarily be regarded as mad,
he will certainly give the impression of cruelty and
will prejudice the judge against him. Latro
[p. 433]
therefore showed admirable skill when he made the son
say, “You will kill me then?” and the father reply,
“Yes, if I can.”1 The elder Gallio treats the theme
with greater tenderness, as was natural to a man of
his disposition. He makes the father say, “Be firm,
my heart, be firm. Yesterday you were made of
sterner stuff.”
1 Si potero is ambiguous. It might mean “If I have the heart to do so.” Here lies the loophole for clemency to which Quintilian has referred.
Quintilian. With An English Translation. Harold Edgeworth Butler. Cambridge. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1922.
The Annenberg CPB/Project 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.