[42]
especially, O judges, when the day of
contest for the greatest distinction of the state, and the day of the
comitia, was at hand. At which time, (for I
know what a nervous thing ambition is, how vehement and how anxious is the
desire for the consulship,) we are afraid of everything, not only of those
things which can be openly found fault with, but even of whatever can be
secretly thought; we shudder at every rumour, at every idle and empty story;
we look anxiously at every one's countenance, at every one's eye. For there
is nothing so soft, so tender, so frail, so flexible, as the inclinations
and feelings of our fellow-citizens towards us; for they are not only angry
at any impropriety in the conduct of candidates, but they often even take a
disgust at our virtuous actions.
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, B. A. London. George Bell & Sons, York Street, Covent Garden. 1891.
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.