previous next

2.

But in this I am forced to comply with the wishes not only of Cornelius, whose desires I cannot possibly thwart in this his hour of danger, but also with those of Cnaeus Pompeius, who has wished me the panegyrist of and the assistant in this action, and this determination, and this kindness of his, as I lately was in another cause which was pleaded before you, O judges.

[5] And it appears to me that this is what the defendant himself deserves, that this is what the unexampled renown of this excellent man deserves, that this is what essentially belongs to the discharge of your duty, and that this is due to the cause itself, that, what it is quite notorious that Cnaeus Pompeius did, all men should allow he had a lawful right to do. For there is nothing more true than that which he himself said yesterday, that Lucius Cornelius had now all his fortunes at stake, without being accused of any single crime of any description. For he is not said to have stolen the rights of a citizen, nor to have given any false account of his family, nor to have proceeded in an underhand manner by any shameless falsehood, nor to have crept fraudulently into the register. One thing alone is imputed to him, that he was born at Gades; a fact which no one denies. All the rest the prosecutor admits. He admits that he served in Spain, in a most severe war, with Quintus Metellus, with Caius Memmius; that he served both in the fleet and in the army; and, when Pompeius came into Spain and began to have Memmius for his quaestor, that he never left Memmius; that he went to take possession of Carthage; that he was present at those two hardly contested and most important battles of Sucro and the Durius; that he remained with Pompeius to the end of the war. [6] These are the battles of Cornelius. Such were his exertions; such was his industry; such were his dangers encountered on behalf of our republic; such was his valour, worthy of a general; while his hopes were hopes of a reward in proportion to his dangers. The rewards themselves are not the actions of him who obtained them, but of him who conferred them.


Creative Commons License
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.

load focus Latin (Albert Clark, 1909)
hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Sort places alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a place to search for it in this document.
Spain (Spain) (2)
Gades (Spain) (1)
Durius (1)
Carthage (Tunisia) (1)

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: