[16]
What, if I produce also
a still greater number of most honourable men to bear testimony to this man's virtue and
innocence? Will the unanimity of the Gauls still be of more weight than that of men of such
great authority? When Fonteius was governor of Gaul,
you know, O judges, that there were very large armies of the Roman people in the two Spains,
and very illustrious generals. How many Roman knights were there, how many military tribunes,
how many ambassadors came to them! what eminent men they were, and how frequently did they
come! Besides that, a very large and admirably appointed army of Cnaeus Pompeius wintered in
Gaul while Marcus Fonteius was governor. Does not
Fortune herself appear to have intended that they should be a sufficient number of
sufficiently competent witnesses of those things which were done in Gaul while Marcus Fonteius was praetor? Out of all that number
of men what witness can you produce in this cause? Who is there of all that body of men whose
authority you are willing to cite? We will use that very man as our panegyrist and our
witness.
This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
M. Tullius Cicero. The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, literally translated by C. D. Yonge, B. A. London. Henry G. Bohn, York Street, Covent Garden. 1856.
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.