7.
On this, that noble man, so exceedingly worthy of being admitted into your
counsels, praised you. Do you, then, you scoundrel, do you as consul condemn
the senate for cruelty before an assembly of the people? For you are not
condemning one who only obeyed the senate;—for that salutary and
diligent report of the conspiracy was the work of the consul; the sentence
and the punishment were the act of the senate. And when you find fault with
them, you show what sort of consul you would have been at that time, if by
chance it had so happened. You, I make no doubt would have considered that
Catiline deserved to be aided with pay and provisions. For, what was the
difference between Catiline and that man to whom you sold the authority of
the senate, the safety of the state, and the whole republic, for the reward
of a province?
[15]
For the consuls assisted
Clodius while doing those very things which Catiline was only attempting
when I as consul defeated his machinations. He, indeed, wished to massacre
the senate; you two abolished it. He wished to destroy the laws by fire and
sword; you two abrogated them. He wished the country to
perish; you two aided him. What, during your consulship, was ever
accomplished except by force of arms? That band of conspirators wished to
fire the city; you two sought to burn the house of that man, to whom it was
owing that the city was not burnt. And even these men, if they had a consul
like you, would never have thought of burning the city: For they did not
wish to deprive themselves of their homes; but as long as those consuls
flourished, they thought that there would be no home for their wickedness.
They desired the slaughter of the citizens; you desired to bring them to
slavery; and in this were even more cruel than they; for, until your
consulship, the spirit of liberty was so deeply implanted in this people,
that they would have thought it preferable to die rather than to become
slaves.
[16]
But that pair of you, acting on
the designs of Catiline and Lentulus, expelled me from my house, and
confined Cnaeus Pompeius to his; for they did not think that as long as I
stood firm, and remained in the city exerting all my vigilance for its
defence, and as long as Cnaeus Pompeius, the conqueror of all the world,
opposed them, they should ever be able utterly to destroy the republic. You
sought even to inflict punishment on me, by which you might make atonement
to the shades of the dead conspirators. You poured forth upon me all the
hatred which had been long nursed in the wicked feelings of impious men. And
if I had not yielded for a while to their frenzy, I should have been
murdered in the tomb of Catiline, under your leadership. But what greater
proof do you want that there is no real difference between you and Catiline,
than is the fact, that you awakened again that same band from the half-dead
relics of Catiline's army? that you collected all abandoned men from all
quarters? that you let loose against me the dregs of the prisons? that you
armed conspirators? that you sought to expose my person and the lives of all
good men to their frenzy and to their swords?
This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
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.