This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
[86]
22. And yet this very question has been decided 1 on many occasions before and since; but in
the war with Pyrrhus the decision rendered by Gaius
Fabricius, in his second consulship, and by our senate
was particularly striking. Without provocation King
Pyrrhus had declared war upon the Roman People;
the struggle was against a generous and powerful
prince, and the supremacy of power was the prize; a
deserter came over from him to the camp of Fabricius
and promised, if Fabricius would assure him of a reward, to return to the camp of Pyrrhus as secretly as
he had come, administer poison to the king, and bring
[p. 361]
about his death. Fabricius saw to it that this fellow
was taken back to Pyrrhus; and his action was commended by the senate. And yet, if the mere show
of expediency and the popular conception of it are
all we want, this one deserter would have put an
end to that wasting war and to a formidable foe of
our supremacy; but it would have been a lasting
shame and disgrace to us to have overcome not by
valour but by crime the man with whom we had a
contest for glory.
1 Apparent conflicts between expediency and moral rectitude: (1) Fabricius and the deserter,
M. Tullius Cicero. De Officiis. With An English Translation. Walter Miller. Cambridge. Harvard University Press; Cambridge, Mass., London, England. 1913.
The Annenberg CPB/Project 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.