Grant that there may be enmity between you; which, however, there ought not to be; for it was king Deiotarus who raised your family, when abject and obscure, from darkness into light. Who ever heard of your father, or who he was, before they heard whose son-in-law he was? But even supposing you repudiated the name of the connection with ever so much ingratitude and impiety, still you might have conducted your quarrel like a man, and not pursue him with a false accusation, not seek his life, not prosecute him on a capital charge. Be it so:—let even this excess of bitterness and hatred be permitted. Was it to go to such an extent that all the laws of ordinary life and of common safety, and even of humanity, are to be violated? to tamper with slaves by words, to corrupt them by hopes and promises; to lead them away to your own house, to arm them against their master, to wage an impious war not against one relation, but against every family in the world? For that corruption of slaves, if it be not only unpunished, but even approved by such a great authority as that of this tribunal, no walls, no laws, no rights will be sufficient for the protection of our safety. For when that which is in our houses and is our own can sally out with impunity and fight against us, slavery then gets the mastery, and the master's position is slavery.
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. 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.