[15]
I am not unwilling, O Romans, to endure this storm of false and unjust
unpopularity as long as the danger of this horrible and nefarious war is warded off from you.
Let him be said to be banished by me as long as he goes into banishment; but, believe me, he
will not go. I will never ask of the immortal gods, O Romans, for the sake of lightening my
own unpopularity, for you to hear that Lucius Catiline is leading an army of enemies, and is
hovering about in arms; but yet in three days you will hear it. And I much more fear that it
will be objected to me some day or other, that I have let him escape, rather than that I have
banished him. But when there are men who say he has been banished because he has gone away,
what would these men say if he had been put to death?
This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
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.