[78]
Commit this fact to memory, O judges. I trust that you and your children will
see many happy days in the republic. On every such occasion these will
always be your feelings,—that if Publius Clodius had been alive,
you never would have seen one of them. We have been led now to conceive the
greatest, and, as I feel sure, the best-founded hopes, that this very day,
this most admirable man being made our consul, when the licentiousness of
men is checked, their evil passions put down, the laws and
courts of justice reestablished on a firm footing, will be a salutary day
for the republic. Is there, then, any one so insane as to think that he
could have obtained all this while Publius Clodius was alive? What? why,
what power of perpetual possession could you have had even in those things
which you possess as your private property and in the strictest sense your
own, while that frenzied man held the reins of government?
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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.
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