[81]
All the men of consular rank are accused at one swoop; so that the name of the most honourable
office in the state appears now to carry with it more unpopularity than dignity.
“They stood by Catiline,” says he, “and praised
him.” At that time there was no conspiracy known of or discovered. They were
defending a friend. They were giving their suppliant the countenance of their presence. They
did not think the moment of his most imminent danger a fit time to reproach him with the
infamy of his life. Moreover, even your own father, O Torquatus, when consul, was the advocate
of Catiline when he was prosecuted on a charge of extortion: he knew he was a bad man, but he
was a suppliant; perhaps he was an audacious man, but he had once been his friend. And, as he
stood by him after information of that first conspiracy had been laid before him, he showed
that he had heard something about him, but that he had not believed it.
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.