41.
If (may Jupiter avert the omen) you condemn this man by your decision, where is the unhappy
man to turn? Home? What that he may see that image of that most illustrious man his father,
which a few days ago he beheld crowned with laurel when men were congratulating him on his
election, now in mourning and lamentation at his disgrace?
[89]
Or to his mother, who, wretched woman, having lately embraced her son as consul, is now in all
the torments or anxiety, lest she should but a short time afterwards behold that same son
stripped of all his dignity? But why do I speak of his home or of his mother, when the new
punishment of the law deprives him of home, and parent, and of the intercourse with and sight
of all his relations? Shall the wretched man then go into banishment? Whither
shall he go? Shall he go to the east, where he was for many years lieutenant, where he
commanded armies, and performed many great exploits? But it is a most painful thing to return
to a place in disgrace, from which you have departed in honour. Shall he hide himself in the
opposite regions of the earth, so as to let Transalpine Gaul see the same man grieving and
mourning, whom it lately saw with the greatest joy, exercising the highest authority? In that
same province, moreover, with what feelings will he behold Caius Murena, his own brother? What
will be the grief of the one what will be the agony of the other? What will be the
lamentations of both? How great will the vicissitudes of fortune appear and what a change will
there be in every one's conversation when in the very places in which a few days before
messengers and letters had repeated, with every indication of joy that Murena had been made
consul in the very places from which his own friends and his hereditary connections flocked to
Rome for the purpose of congratulating him he himself arrives on a sudden as the messenger of
his own misfortune.
[90]
And if these things seem bitter and
miserable and grievous if they are most foreign to your general clemency and merciful
disposition, O judges, then maintain the kindness done to him by the Roman people restore the
consul to the republic grant this to his own modesty, grant it to his dead father, grant it to
his race and family, grant it also to Lanuvium, that most honourable municipality, the whole
population of which you have seen watching this cause with tears and mourning. Do not tear
from his ancestral sacrifices to Juno Sospita, to whom all consuls are hound to offer
sacrifice, a consul who is so peculiarly her own. Him, if my recommendation has any weight if
my solemn assertion has any authority, I now recommend to you, O judges—I the consul
recommend him to you as consul, promising and undertaking that he will prove most desirous of
tranquillity, most anxious to consult the interests of virtuous men, very active against
sedition, very brave in war, and an irreconcilable enemy to this conspiracy, which is at this
moment seeking to undermine the republic.
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