[50]
If he had been in his senses, if he had not been already paying to his
country and to the immortal gods that penalty which is the most terrible of
all, by his frenzy and insanity, would he have cared, (I say nothing of his
leaving his province, of his taking his army out of it, of his declaring and
carrying on war of his own accord, of his entering a foreign kingdom without
any command from the people or from the senate to do so; conduct which many
of the ancient laws, and especially the Cornelian law concerning treason,
and the Julian law concerning extortion, forbid in the plainest manner; but
I say nothing of all this,)—would he, I say, if he had not been
most outrageously mad, have dared to take to himself the province which
Publius Lentulus, a man most sincerely attached to this order, had abdicated
from scruples of religion, though he had obtained it both by the authority
of the senate and by lot when even if there were no religious obstacles in
his case, still the usage of our ancestors, and all
precedents, and the severest penalties of the laws forbade it?
This text is part of:
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.
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.