Are you reserved for this? Are you chosen for this? To condemn those whom cut-throats and assassins have not been able to murder? God forbid, o judges, that this which our ancestors thought fit to style the public council should now be considered a guard to brokers! It behoves wise men, and men endowed with the authority and power with which you are endowed, to remedy especially those evils by which the republic is especially injured. There is not one of you who does not understand that the Roman people, who used formerly to be thought extremely merciful towards its enemies, is at present suffering from cruelty exercised towards its fellow-citizens. Remove this disease out of the state, o judges! Do not allow it to remain any longer in the republic; having not only this evil in itself, that it has destroyed so many citizens in a most atrocious manner, but that through habituating them to sights of distress, it has even taken away clemency from the hearts of most merciful men. For when every hour we see or hear of something very cruel being done, even we who are by nature most merciful, through the constant repetition of miseries, lose from our minds every feeling of humanity.

(Translation by C.D. Yonge, from Perseus Project)

back to Latin text

sei il visitatore numero