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[13]
Do you think, O conscript fathers, that I would have voted for the resolution
which you adopted against your own wills, of mingling funeral obsequies with
supplications? of introducing inexplicable impiety into the republic? of
decreeing supplications in honour of a dead man? I say nothing about who the man
was. Even had he been that great Lucius Brutus who himself also delivered the
republic from kingly power, and who has produced posterity nearly five hundred
years after himself of similar virtue, and equal to similar
achievements—even then I could not have been induced to join any dead
man in a religious observance paid to the immortal gods; so that a supplication
should be addressed by public authority to a man who has nowhere a sepulcher at
which funeral obsequies may be celebrated.
I, O conscript fathers, should have delivered my opinion, which I could easily
have defended against the Roman people, if any heavy misfortune had happened to
the republic, such as war, or pestilence, or famine; some of which, indeed, do
exist already, and I have my fears lest others are impending. But I pray that
the immortal gods may pardon this act, both to the Roman people, which does not
approve of it, and to this order, which voted it with great unwillingness.
M. Tullius Cicero. The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, literally translated by C. D. Yonge. London. George Bell & Sons. 1903.
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