This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
[14]
And it is certain that this my opinion, O conscript
fathers, will be approved of by the opinion of Publius Servilius, who has given
his vote that a sepulcher be publicly decreed to Servius Sulpicius, but has
voted against the statue. For if the death of an ambassador happening without
bloodshed and violence requires no honor, why does he vote for the honor of a
public funeral, which is the greatest honor that can be paid to a dead man? If
he grants that to Servius Sulpicius which was not given to Gnaeus. Octavius, why
does he think that we ought not to give to the former what was given to the
latter? Our ancestors, indeed, decreed statues to many men; public sepulchers to
few. But statues perish by weather, by violence, by lapse of time; but the
sanctity of the sepulchers is in the soil itself, which can neither be moved nor
destroyed by any violence; and while other things are extinguished, so
sepulchers become holier by age.
M. Tullius Cicero. The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, literally translated by C. D. Yonge. London. George Bell & Sons. 1903.
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.