Book 6

1.pr. ON CHASTITY From what source shall I invoke you, Chastity, the chief stay of men and women alike? For you dwell on the hearths of Vesta, consecrated by the ancient religion; you recline upon the cushions of Capitoline Juno; you frequent, with unbroken watch, the pillar of the Palatine, its august household gods and the most sacred marriage couch of Julia; by your protection the insignia of boyhood are made safe; by regard for your divinity the pure flower of youth endures; under your guardianship the matron's gown is held in honour. Be present, then, and recognize the things which you yourself willed to come to pass.

1.1. The leader of Roman chastity was Lucretia, whose manly spirit, by the malign error of fortune, was allotted a woman's body. Forced to suffer outrage by violence from Sextus Tarquinius, son of King Superbus, when in most weighty words she had bewailed her injury in the assembly of her kinsmen, she slew herself with a blade which she had brought concealed under her dress, and by so spirited a death furnished to the Roman people the cause of exchanging consular government for royal.

1.2. And whereas she did not endure an outrage inflicted, Verginius, a man of plebeian birth but of patrician spirit, that his house might not be defiled by disgrace, did not spare his own blood: for, when Appius Claudius the decemvir, relying on the powers of his office, was too persistently seeking the violation of his maiden daughter, he led the girl into the forum and killed her, choosing to be the slayer of a chaste girl rather than the father of a corrupted one.

1.3. Nor was Pontius Aufidianus, a Roman knight, endowed with any other strength of spirit, who, after he learned that his daughter's virginity had been betrayed by her tutor to Fannius Saturninus, not content with afflicting the wicked slave with punishment, killed the girl herself as well. Thus, that he might not celebrate her shameful marriage, he led her bitter funeral.

1.4. What a severe guardian of chastity did Publius Maenius show himself to be! For he punished a freedman, very dear to him, because he had learned that he had given a kiss to his daughter, now of marriageable age—although especially he could seem to have slipped not from lust but from error. But he judged it of great importance that the discipline of chastity be implanted in the still tender senses of the girl by the bitterness of the punishment, and by so grim an example he taught her to carry not only her virginity unblemished but even her kisses pure to her husband.

1.5. But Quintus Fabius Maximus Servilianus, after the honours which he had borne most splendidly had been crowned by the gravity of the censorship, exacted punishment from a son of doubtful chastity, and, having punished him, paid the penalty by a voluntary withdrawal, avoiding the sight of his fatherland.

1.6. I should say that this man of censorian rank had proved too savage, did I not behold Publius Atilius Philiscus, compelled in his boyhood by his master to make profit of his body, afterwards so severe a father: for he killed his own daughter because she had stained herself with the charge of debauchery. How holy, then, ought we to think chastity to have been in our state, in which we observe that even peddlers of lust turned out such severe avengers of it?

1.7. There follows an example of an excellent name and a memorable deed. Marcus Claudius Marcellus, curule aedile, named a day for Gaius Scantinius Capitolinus, tribune of the plebs, before the people, because he had solicited his son for debauchery; and when Scantinius asserted that he could not be compelled to appear, because he held a sacrosanct power, and on that account implored the aid of the tribunes, the whole college of tribunes declared that it would not intercede to prevent the inquiry into chastity from being carried through. And so Scantinius, cited as defendant, was condemned on the single witness who had been tempted. It is agreed that the young man, brought forward to the rostra, with his face fixed on the ground persistently kept silent, and by his modest silence availed very much for his own vengeance.

1.8. Metellus Celer too proved a keen punisher of a debauched mind, by naming a day before the people for Gnaeus Sergius Silo, on account of money promised to a mother of a household, and by condemning him on this one charge: for then not a deed, but the intention, was brought to trial, and it harmed him more to have wished to sin than it profited him not to have sinned.

1.9. This was the gravity of the assembly; the following, of the senate. Titus Veturius, the son of that Veturius who in his consulship had been surrendered to the Samnites on account of a treaty disgracefully struck, when, on account of the ruin of his house and a grievous debt, he had been compelled, a mere youth, to give himself as a bondsman to Publius Plotius, and was afflicted by him with servile beatings because he had refused to suffer debauchery, laid a complaint before the consuls. Informed of this matter by them, the senate ordered Plotius to be led to prison: for it willed that chastity, in whatever station it was placed, should be safe to Roman blood.

1.10. And what wonder is it if the whole body of senators decreed this? Gaius Pescennius, a triumvir for capital cases, loaded with public chains Gaius Cornelius, who had served out his campaigns in the bravest soldiering and had four times been honoured by his commanders, in the name of valour, with the office of chief centurion, because he had had commerce of debauchery with a freeborn youth. When the tribunes were appealed to by him, and although he denied nothing about the debauchery but said he was prepared to make a wager that that young man had openly and publicly made profit of his body, they were unwilling to interpose their intercession. And so Cornelius was compelled to die in prison: for the tribunes of the plebs did not think it fitting for our commonwealth to bargain with brave men, so as to buy domestic indulgences with foreign dangers.

1.11. An equally foul end follows the punishment of the lustful centurion, that of Marcus Laetorius Mergus, a military tribune. Cominius, tribune of the plebs, named a day before the people for him, because he had solicited his orderly for debauchery. Nor could Laetorius bear the consciousness of that deed, but punished himself, before the time of trial, first by flight, then even by death. He had fulfilled the measure of nature, yet, though he had met his fate, by the verdict of the whole plebs he was condemned on the charge of unchastity. The military standards, the consecrated eagles, and the most certain guardian of the Roman empire, the severe discipline of the camp, pursued him even to the shades below, since he was trying to prove the corrupter of that purity of which he ought to have been the master.

1.12. This moved Gaius Marius, then commander, when he pronounced that Gaius Lusius, his sister's son, a military tribune, had been lawfully killed by Gaius Plotius, a soldier of the ranks, because he had dared to solicit him for debauchery.

1.13. But, to run briefly over those too who, in avenging chastity, used their own grief in place of the public law: Sempronius Musca scourged with whips Gaius Gellius, caught in adultery; Gaius Memmius likewise pounded with hams Lucius Octavius, similarly caught; Carbo Attienus by Vibienus, and likewise Pontius by Publius Cerennius, when caught, were castrated; and the man who had caught Gnaeus Furius Brocchus exposed him to be debauched by his household slaves. To these it was no crime to have indulged their own anger.

1e.1. And to attach foreign examples to domestic ones: a Greek woman named Hippo, when she had been captured by an enemy fleet, threw herself into the sea, that by death she might preserve her chastity. Her body, washed up on the Erythraean shore, the earth nearest the waves covered, consigned to burial, with a mound that conceals it to this day; but the glory of her holiness, handed over to eternal memory, Greece by celebrating with the highest praises makes daily more flourishing.

1e.2. This is a more vehement, that a more deliberate example of chastity. When the army and forces of the Gallo-Greeks had been partly destroyed, partly captured, by the consul Gnaeus Manlius on Mount Olympus, the wife of the chieftain Orgiago, of marvellous beauty, was compelled to suffer outrage by the centurion to whom she had been handed over for safekeeping; and when it came to that place to which the centurion, having sent a messenger, had ordered the woman's kinsmen to bring the price by which they might ransom her, while the centurion was weighing out the gold, his mind and eyes intent on its weight, she ordered the Gallo-Greeks in the tongue of her own nation to kill him. Then, holding in her hands the head, cut off, of the slain man, she came to her husband and, casting it before his feet, set forth the order of her injury and of her revenge. What else than that her body had come into the power of the enemy could anyone say of this woman? For neither could her spirit be conquered nor her chastity captured.

1e.3. But the wives of the Teutons begged Marius, the victor, that they might be sent by him as a gift to the Vestal virgins, affirming that they would be, equally with them, free from the embrace of a man; and when this was not granted, on the next night they took away their breath with nooses. Better did the gods that they did not give this spirit to the women's husbands in the battle line: for had they been willing to imitate the courage of their women, they would have rendered the trophies of the Teutonic victory uncertain.

2.pr. FREELY SAID OR DONE But liberty, a thing of vehement spirit attested alike by sayings and by deeds, as I have not invited, so, coming of its own accord, I have not shut out. Placed between virtue and vice, if it has tempered itself in a salutary measure it earns praise; if it has poured itself out where it ought not, it earns reproach. And it is thus more pleasing to the ears of the crowd than approvable to the mind of the wisest man, inasmuch as it is more often safe by another's pardon than by its own foresight. But since it is our purpose to follow through the parts of human life, let it be related by our good faith with its own estimation.

2.1. When Privernum had been captured and those who had incited that town to rebel had been killed, the senate, inflamed with indignation, was debating what should be done about the rest of the people of Privernum too. By a doubtful chance, therefore, their safety wavered, exposed at the same time both to victors and to the angry. But, when they perceived that their only help remained in entreaty, they could not forget their freeborn and Italian blood: for their chief man, asked in the senate-house what punishment they deserved, answered, "What they deserve who judge themselves worthy of liberty." By his words he had taken up arms and had inflamed the exasperated minds of the senators. But Plautius the consul, favouring the cause of the people of Privernum, offered a path of retreat from his spirited saying and asked what kind of peace the Romans would have with them if impunity were granted. But he, with a most steadfast countenance, said, "If you give a good one, a lasting peace; if a bad one, not a long-lasting one." By this utterance it was brought about that to the conquered not only pardon but even the right and benefit of our citizenship was given.

2.2. Thus the man of Privernum dared to speak in the senate; but Lucius Philippus the consul did not hesitate to exercise liberty against that same order: for, reproaching its sluggishness before the rostra, he said that he had need of another senate, and was so far from repenting of the saying that he even ordered a hand to be laid on Lucius Crassus, a man of the highest dignity and eloquence, who was taking it grievously in the senate-house. He, the lictor thrown off, said, "You are not consul to me, Philippus, because neither am I senator to you."

2.3. What? Did liberty leave the people safe from its assault? Nay, it both assailed them likewise and found them equally patient. Gnaeus Carbo, tribune of the plebs, the most turbulent champion of the lately buried Gracchan sedition and likewise the most burning torch of the rising civil evils, led Publius Africanus—who was coming from the ruins of Numantia with the highest brilliance of glory—from almost the very gate to the rostra, and asked him what he thought about the death of Tiberius Gracchus, whose sister he had in marriage, so that by the authority of a most illustrious man he might add much increase to the conflagration now begun, because he did not doubt that, on account of so close a connection by marriage, he would speak something piteously for the memory of his slain kinsman. But Africanus answered that he seemed to have been lawfully slain. When at this saying the assembly, kindled by tribunician fury, had violently cried out against him, "Let those be silent," he said, "to whom Italy is a stepmother." Then, a murmur arising, "You will not bring it about," he said, "that I should fear unbound those whom I brought in chains." The whole people, rebuked a second time and insultingly by one man—how great is the honour of virtue!—was silent. His own recent Numantine victory, and his father's Macedonian one, and the ancestral spoils of conquered Carthage, and the chained necks of two kings, Syphax and Perseus, before the triumphal chariots, then closed the mouths of the whole forum. Nor was the silence given to fear, but because, by the benefit of the Aemilian and Cornelian clans, many fears of the city and of Italy had been ended, the Roman plebs was not free against the liberty of Scipio.

2.4. Wherefore we ought to wonder the less that the most ample authority of Gnaeus Pompeius so often struggled with liberty, and not without great praise, since with calm brow he bore being the sport of the license of men of every kind. Gnaeus Piso, when he was prosecuting Manilius Crispus as defendant, and saw that, though evidently guilty, he was being snatched away by the favour of Pompey, carried away by youthful impulse and zeal for the accusation, hurled many and grave charges against the most powerful defender. Then, asked by him why he did not accuse him too, "Give sureties to the commonwealth," he said, "that you will not, if you are accused, stir up a civil war, and I will send the judges into council about you before about the life of Manilius." Thus in one and the same trial he sustained two defendants, Manilius by accusation, Pompey by liberty, and the one of them he pursued by law, the other by declaration—the only means by which he could.

2.5. What then? Liberty without Cato? No more than Cato without liberty: for when, as a judge, he had taken his seat over a guilty and infamous senator as defendant, and tablets had been produced containing the commendation of Gnaeus Pompeius for him—tablets that beyond doubt would be effective for the culprit—he removed them from the inquiry by reciting the law by which it was provided that senators should not be allowed to use such aid. To this deed the person removes wonder: for what in another would seem audacity, in Cato is recognized as confidence.

2.6. Gnaeus Lentulus Marcellinus the consul, when in an assembly he was complaining about the excessive power of Pompey the Great, and the whole people had assented to him with a clear voice, said, "Cry out, cry out, Quirites, while it is permitted: for soon it will not be permitted you to do so with impunity." The power of that eminent citizen was then assailed, on this side by an odious complaint, on that by a pitiable lamentation.

2.7. To Pompey, who had a white bandage tied around his leg, Favonius said, "It makes no difference on what part of the body the diadem is," reproaching him with royal powers by the jeer of a scrap of cloth. But he, his countenance changed neither way, guarded against both: lest he should seem either with cheerful brow gladly to acknowledge his power, or with a sad one now to profess it. And by that forbearance he gave access against himself even to men of lower rank and fortune: of whose number it will be enough to have related two.

2.8. Helvius Mancia of Formiae, a freedman's son, of extreme old age, was accusing Lucius Libo before the censors. In this contest, when Pompey the Great, reproaching him with his lowliness and his age, had said that he had been sent back from the dead to accuse, "You do not lie, Pompey," he said: "for I come from the dead, I come as accuser against Lucius Libo. But while I lingered there, I saw, bloodied, Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus weeping that, born of the highest family, of a most upright life, most loving of his fatherland, in the very flower of his youth he had been killed by your order. I saw, conspicuous for equal renown, Marcus Brutus mangled by the sword, complaining that this had befallen him first by your treachery, then even by your cruelty. I saw Gnaeus Carbo, the keenest defender of your boyhood and of your father's goods, in his third consulship bound with chains which you had ordered to be cast upon him, protesting that, against all right and wrong, when he was in the highest command, he had been slaughtered by you, a Roman knight. I saw, in the same plight and outcry, the praetorian Perpenna cursing your savagery, and all these with one voice indignant that, uncondemned, they had perished under you, a young executioner." Over the most vast wounds of the civil wars, now closed by old scars, it was permitted, with impunity, to a man of a country town, redolent of his father's slavery, of unbridled rashness, of intolerable spirit, to reopen them. And so at the same time it was both most brave and most safe to revile Gnaeus Pompeius. But the somewhat lower lot of the person who follows does not permit us to pursue this with longer complaint.

2.9. Diphilus the tragic actor, when at the Apollinarian Games, in the course of the action, he had come to that verse in which this sentiment is contained, "By our misery he is great," with his hands directed at Pompey the Great pronounced it, and, recalled several times by the people, without any hesitation persistently played him by his gesture as guilty of excessive and intolerable power. He used the same impudence in this part too: "The time will come when you shall grievously groan for that valour."

2.10. The spirit of Marcus Castricius too was inflamed with liberty. He, when he was holding a magistracy at Placentia, and Gnaeus Carbo the consul ordered a decree to be made by which hostages should be given to him by the people of Placentia, neither obeyed his supreme command nor yielded to his greatest forces; and even, when Carbo said that he had many swords, replied, "And I have years." So many legions were astonished, beholding so robust a remnant of old age. The anger too of Carbo, because it had very little material for raging—being about to take away but a little span of life—collapsed upon itself.

2.11. Now there is the demand, full of rashness, of Servius Galba, who endured to interrupt the deified Julius, as, his victories accomplished, he was administering justice in the forum, in this manner: "Gaius Julius Caesar, for Gnaeus Pompeius the Great, once your son-in-law, in his third consulship I went surety for money, on which account I am now sued. What am I to do? Am I to pay?" By openly and plainly reproaching him with the sale of Pompey's goods, he had deserved to be removed from the tribunal. But that breast, milder than mildness itself, ordered Pompey's debt to be paid from its own treasury.

2.12. Come now, Cascellius, a man famous for his knowledge of the civil law—how dangerously stubborn! For by no one's favour or authority could he be compelled to draw up a formula concerning any of those things which the triumvirs had granted, placing by this judgment of his mind all their benefits outside the whole order of the laws. The same man, when he spoke rather freely about the times of Caesar, and his friends warned him not to do so, answered that two things which seem most bitter to men furnished him great license—old age and childlessness.

2e.1. A woman of foreign blood inserts herself among such great men, who, undeservedly condemned by King Philip when drunk, cried out that she appealed against the verdict; and when he asked to whom she appealed, "To Philip," she said, "but sober." She shook off the drowsiness from the yawning man and by her presence of mind compelled the drunkard to come to his senses, and, the case being more diligently examined, forced him to deliver a juster verdict. Thus she wrung out the equity which she had not been able to obtain, having borrowed protection rather from liberty than from her innocence.

2e.2. Now that liberty was not only brave but even witty. A certain woman of extreme old age, at Syracuse, when all were seeking with their prayers the death of the tyrant Dionysius on account of the excessive harshness of his character and his intolerable burdens, she alone daily in the morning prayed the gods that he might be unharmed and might survive her. When he learned this, marvelling at goodwill not owed to him, he summoned her and asked why she did this and on account of what merit of his. Then she said, "The reason of my purpose is sure: for as a girl, when we had a grievous tyrant, I desired to be rid of him. When he was killed, one somewhat more foul occupied the citadel. I judged it of great importance that his domination too should be ended. As the third, we began to have you, a more troublesome ruler than your predecessors. And so, lest, if you are taken away, a worse one should succeed into your place, I devote my own life for your safety." So witty an audacity Dionysius blushed to punish.

2e.3. Between these women and Theodorus of Cyrene there could be as it were a marriage of spirited courage, equal in virtue, unlike in fortune: for he, to King Lysimachus, who was threatening him with death, said, "Indeed a magnificent thing has befallen you, because you have attained the power of a Spanish fly." And when, kindled by this saying, Lysimachus had ordered him to be fastened to a cross, "Let this be terrible to your courtiers," he said: "to me, indeed, it makes no difference whether I rot on the ground or aloft."

3.pr. ON SEVERITY The breast must arm itself with hardness while the deeds of grim and stern severity are narrated, so that, every milder thought set aside, it may have leisure for things harsh to hear: for thus drawn and inexorable punishments and various kinds of penalties will run forth into the midst—useful safeguards indeed of the laws, but by no means to be placed in the calm and quiet number of pages.

3.1a. Marcus Manlius was hurled down from that very place from which he had driven the Gauls, because he had wickedly attempted to crush the liberty he had bravely defended. The preface to this just vengeance was, doubtless, this: "Manlius you were to me, when you were driving the Senones headlong; after you began to imitate them, you became one of the Senones." Upon his punishment a mark of eternal memory was set: for on his account it was resolved to ordain by law that no patrician should dwell in the citadel or the Capitol, because he had had his house in that place where we now see the temple of Moneta.

3.1b. An equal indignation of the state burst out against Spurius Cassius, whom the suspicion of coveted domination harmed more than three magnificent consulships and two most splendid triumphs profited: for the senate and Roman people, not content with afflicting him with capital punishment, threw down his house, that he might be punished also by the ruin of his household gods; and on the site they built the temple of Tellus. And so what had before been the dwelling of an uncontrolled man is now a monument of religious severity.

3.1c. The fatherland punished with a like end Spurius Maelius, who dared the same thing. The site of his house, indeed, that the justice of the punishment might reach posterity more notable, took the name Aequimelium. How great a hatred, therefore, against the enemies of liberty the ancients had implanted in their minds they testified by the ruins of the walls and roofs in which such men had lived. And so too the household gods of Marcus Flaccus and Lucius Saturninus, most seditious citizens, when their bodies had been slaughtered, were torn out from their deepest foundations. But the Flaccian site, after it had long remained almost empty, was adorned by Quintus Catulus with the Cimbric spoils.

3.1d. There flourished in our state the highest nobility and the most ample promise of Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus. But because they had attempted to overturn the constitution of the state, their corpses lay unburied, and the last honour of the human condition was wanting to the sons of Gracchus and the grandsons of Africanus. Nay, even their intimates, that no one might wish to be a friend to the enemies of the commonwealth, were hurled down from the Rock.

3.2. Publius Mucius the tribune of the plebs believed the same thing permitted to himself which he believed permitted to the senate and Roman people, who burned alive all his colleagues who under the lead of Spurius Cassius had so acted that, the magistrates not being replaced, the common liberty was called into doubt. There is surely nothing more confident than this severity: for one tribune dared to inflict on nine colleagues that punishment which nine tribunes would have shuddered to exact from one colleague.

3.3. Thus far severity is the guardian and avenger of liberty; but for the sake of dignity also and of discipline it is equally grave: for the senate surrendered Marcus Claudius to the Corsicans, because he had made a shameful peace with them. When he was not accepted by the enemy, it ordered him to be put to death in the public prison—in how many ways, the majesty of the empire once injured, is anger a persistent avenger! It rescinded his act, took away his liberty, extinguished his breath, defiled his body with the insult of prison and the detestable mark of the Gemonian Stairs. And this man indeed had deserved the senate's animadversion; but Gnaeus Cornelius Scipio Hispallus's son experienced it before he could deserve it: for, when the province of Spain had fallen to him by lot, it decreed that he should not go there, adding the reason that he did not know how to act rightly. And so Cornelius, on account of the dishonourable conduct of his life, without any provincial administration, was all but condemned under the law of extortion. Not even in the case of Gaius Vettienus, who had cut off the fingers of his left hand that he might not serve in the Italian War, did the severity of the senate slacken: for, his goods confiscated, it decreed that he himself should be punished with perpetual chains and brought it about that the breath which he had been unwilling honourably to pour out in the battle line he should disgracefully waste away in chains.

3.4. Imitating this deed, Manius Curius the consul, when he had been compelled suddenly to proclaim a levy and not one of the young men had answered, all the tribes being thrown into the lot, ordered the first name to be drawn from the urn out of the Pollia, which had come out first, to be cited, and, when that man did not answer, set the young man's goods up at the spear. When this was announced to him, he ran to the consul's tribunal and appealed to the college of tribunes. Then Manius Curius, having said by way of preface that the commonwealth had no need of that citizen who did not know how to obey, sold both his goods and himself.

3.5. Equally tenacious of his purpose was Lucius Domitius: for when as praetor he was governing Sicily and a boar of remarkable size had been brought to him, he ordered the shepherd, by whose hand it had been killed, to be brought to him, and, having asked who had dispatched that beast, after he learned that he had used a hunting spear, he crucified him, because he himself, in order to drive out the brigandage by which the province was being laid waste, had proclaimed that no one should have a weapon. Someone might say that this should be placed on the borderline between severity and savagery—for by argument it can be bent either way—but the reason of public command does not allow a praetor to be thought too harsh.

3.6. Thus severity exercised itself in punishing men, but it acted no more sluggishly even in afflicting women with punishment. Horatius, victor first in the battle of the three Curiatii, then by the terms of the fight of all the Albans, when, returning home from that most illustrious battle line, he had seen his maiden sister weeping for the death of Curiatius her betrothed more lavishly than that age ought, killed her with the sword by which he had managed his fatherland's affairs well, judging insufficiently chaste the tears which were given to a too-precipitate love. Indicted on this charge before the people, his father defended him. Thus the girl's somewhat too inclined disposition toward the memory of her future husband had both a fierce avenger in her brother and a father so rigid an approver of the vengeance.

3.7. Using a like severity afterward, the senate, in the consulship of Spurius Postumius Albinus and Quintus Marcius Philippus, charged them to inquire into those women who had used the rites of the Bacchanalia unchastely. When many of them had been condemned by these consuls, their relatives within their houses inflicted punishment upon them all, and the widely extending foulness of the disgrace was amended by the severity of the punishment, because, as much shame as the women had brought upon our state by behaving shamefully, so much praise did they bring, when gravely punished.

3.8. But Publicia, who had killed her husband the consul Postumius Albinus with poison, and likewise Licinia, who had killed her husband Claudius Asellus, were strangled by the decree of their kinsmen: for those most severe men did not think that, in so evident a crime, the long time of a public inquiry should be awaited. And so, of women whose defenders they would have been had they been innocent, they proved the prompt avengers, since they were guilty.

3.9. By a great crime the severity of these men was roused to exact vengeance; but that of Egnatius Mecenius by a far lesser cause, who, having struck with a cudgel his wife because she had drunk wine, killed her, and that deed lacked not only an accuser but even a censurer, since everyone judged that by an excellent example she had paid the penalty for violated sobriety. And indeed whatever woman immoderately seeks the use of wine closes the door to all virtues and opens it to all faults.

3.10. Horrid too was the marital sternness of Gaius Sulpicius Gallus: for he dismissed his wife because he had learned that she had gone abroad with her head uncovered—a curt verdict, but yet fortified by some reason: "For the law," he said, "appoints for you only my eyes, by which you may make trial of your beauty. For these prepare the instruments of adornment, for these be beautiful, entrust yourself to the surer knowledge of these. Any further sight of you, summoned by superfluous provocation, must cleave in suspicion and accusation."

3.11. Nor did Quintus Antistius Vetus feel otherwise in repudiating his wife, because he had seen her in public speaking secretly with a certain common freedwoman: for, moved, so to speak, by the cradles and nurslings of fault, not by the fault itself, he furnished a vengeance prior to the offence, so as to guard against the wrong rather than to avenge it.

3.12. To these is to be joined Publius Sempronius Sophus, who afflicted his wife with the mark of repudiation for nothing other than that she had dared, without his knowledge, to watch the games. Therefore, while women were thus once met, their minds were far from offences.

3e.1. But although the whole world can be instructed by the Roman examples of severity, yet it is not a thing of disgust to know foreign ones too summarily. The Lacedaemonians ordered the books of Archilochus to be exported from their state, because they thought their reading too little modest and chaste: for they were unwilling that the minds of their children should be imbued with them, lest it should harm their characters more than it profited their talents. And so the greatest poet—or certainly the one next to the greatest—because he had torn at a house hateful to him with obscene abuse, they punished with the exile of his poems.

3e.2. The Athenians, moreover, afflicted with capital punishment Timagoras, because, in the course of paying a greeting, he had flattered King Darius after the manner of that nation, taking it grievously that by the humble blandishments of one citizen the dignity of their whole city had been submitted to the Persian domination.

3e.3. Now Cambyses was of unusual severity, who ordered the skin, stripped from the body of a certain bad judge, to be stretched over the chair, and his son to sit on it to give judgment. But, both king and barbarian, by an atrocious and novel penalty for a judge, he provided that no judge afterward could be corrupted.

4.pr. GRAVELY SAID OR DONE A great and good part of praise in famous men is claimed also by those things which either were gravely said by them or done, and which persistent memory has grasped with eternal strength. From their overflowing abundance let us draw, with a hand neither too sparing nor again too greedy, what may rather satisfy desire than abound to satiety.

4.1. When our state had been struck by the disaster of Cannae, and the safety of the commonwealth, hanging by a very slender thread, depended on the loyalty of the allies, in order that their minds might be more steadfast in defending the Roman dominion, it pleased the greater part of the senate that the chief men of the Latins should be chosen into their order. But Annius the Campanian asserted that one of the consuls too ought to be created at Capua: so bruised and sick was the spirit of the Roman empire. Then Manlius Torquatus, the son of that man who had routed the Latins in the renowned battle at Veseris, announced, in as clear a voice as he could, that if any of the allies dared to deliver an opinion among the senators, he would kill him at once. These threats of one man both restored their former heat to the languishing minds of the Romans and did not allow Italy to rise up to make its right of citizenship equal with ours: for as it had yielded, broken by the arms of the father, so now by the words of the son. Equal too was the gravity of that Manlius, to whom, when the consulship was offered by the consent of all and he refused it under the excuse of the adverse health of his eyes, when all were pressing him, he said, "Seek another, Quirites, to whom you may transfer this honour: for if you compel me to bear it, neither shall I be able to bear your characters nor you to endure my command." So weighty was the utterance of a private man: how grave would the consul's fasces have proved!

4.2. No less keen was the gravity of Scipio Aemilianus, whether in the senate-house or in the assembly. He, when he had Mummius as his colleague in the censorship, a man as noble as he was of nerveless life, said before the rostra that he would conduct all things in accordance with the majesty of the commonwealth, whether the citizens had given him a colleague or had not given him one. The same man, when the consuls Servius Sulpicius Galba and Aurelius were contending in the senate which of them should be sent against Viriathus into Spain, and there was great dissension among the senators, all awaiting whither his opinion would incline, said, "Neither of them, in my view, should be sent, because the one has nothing, and to the other nothing is enough"—judging poverty and avarice equally bad mistresses of licentious command. By this saying he obtained that neither was sent into the province.

4.3. But Gaius Popilius, sent by the senate as legate to Antiochus, that he should refrain from the war by which he was provoking Ptolemy, when he had come to him, and Antiochus with ready mind and a most friendly countenance had stretched out his right hand to him, was unwilling to stretch out his own in return, but handed over the tablets containing the decree of the senate. When Antiochus had read them, he said that he would confer with his friends. Popilius, indignant that he had interposed some delay, marked with a rod the ground on which Antiochus was standing and said, "Before you step out of this circle, give me an answer which I may report to the senate." You would have believed not that a legate was speaking, but that the very senate-house was set before your eyes: for at once the king affirmed that he would see to it that Ptolemy should complain of him no further, and then at last Popilius grasped his hand as that of an ally. How effective is the curt gravity of spirit and speech! At the same moment it terrified the kingdom of Syria and protected that of Egypt.

4.4. But whether I should rate the words or the deeds of Publius Rutilius more highly I know not: for in both there is equally an admirable strength. When he was resisting the unjust request of a certain friend, and that man had said with the utmost indignation, "What need, then, have I of your friendship, if you do not do what I ask?" he replied, "Nay, what need have I of yours, if on your account I am to do something dishonourable?" Consonant with this utterance is that deed of his, that, having been made a defendant rather by the dissension of the orders than by any fault of his own, he neither put on shabby clothing nor laid aside the insignia of a senator nor stretched out suppliant hands to the knees of the judges nor said anything lower than the splendour of his past years, and brought it about that his peril was not a hindrance to his gravity but a proof of it. And even when the Sullan victory offered him a return to his fatherland, he remained in exile, lest he should do anything against the laws. Wherefore one would more justly assign the surname of "the Fortunate" to the character of a most grave man than to the arms of an uncontrolled one: which surname Sulla seized, Rutilius deserved.

4.5. Marcus Brutus, the parricide of his own virtues before of the parent of his fatherland—for by a single deed he both hurled those virtues into the abyss and suffused all the memory of his name with inexpiable detestation—about to enter his last battle, when some were saying that it ought not to be joined, said, "I go down confidently into the battle line: for today either it shall be well, or I shall care for nothing." He had presumed, of course, that he could neither live without victory nor die without freedom from care.

4e.1. The mention of him suggests to me to relate what was gravely said against Decimus Brutus in Spain: for when almost the whole of Lusitania had surrendered to him, and the single city of that nation, Cinginnia, persistently retained its arms, a ransom being attempted, with almost one mouth it answered the envoys of Brutus that iron had been left to it by its ancestors, with which to protect the city, not gold, with which to buy liberty from an avaricious commander. Better, doubtless, would men of our blood have said that than heard it.

4e.2. But these men nature led into these footprints of gravity; Socrates, however, the most illustrious pillar of Greek learning, when he was pleading his cause at Athens, and Lysias had recited to him a defence, composed by himself, which he might use in the trial, humble and suppliant, accommodated to the impending storm, said, "Take that away, I beg: for I, if I could be induced to deliver it in the furthest wilderness of Scythia, would then grant that I deserved to be punished with death." He scorned his life rather than lack gravity, and Socrates preferred to be extinguished than Lysias to survive.

4e.3. As great in arms as this man in wisdom, Alexander nobly uttered that famous saying: for when Darius, having now tried his valour in one battle and a second, and therefore promising both a part of his kingdom as far as Mount Taurus and his daughter in marriage with ten times a hundred thousand talents, and Parmenion had said that he, if he were Alexander, would use that condition, Alexander answered, "And I would use it, if I were Parmenion"—an utterance answering to two victories and worthy that a third should be assigned to it, as in fact happened.

4e.4. And these utterances, indeed, were both of a magnificent spirit and of a prosperous state; but that one, by which the envoys of the Lacedaemonians attested before his father the wretched condition of their courage, was more glorious than to be wished for: for to him, who was entangling their state in intolerable burdens, they answered that, if he persevered in commanding anything heavier than death, they would prefer death.

4e.5. Nor was the saying of a certain Spartan slight in weight, since, excelling in nobility and holiness but defeated in his candidacy for a magistracy, he declared that it was a matter of the greatest joy to him that his fatherland had some men better than himself. By this speech he made his rejection equal to the honour.

5.pr. ON JUSTICE It is time to approach also the holy inner shrines of justice, in which regard for what is equitable and upright always dwells with religious observance, and where the zeal for modesty yields, where desire yields to reason, and nothing is held useful which can seem too little honourable. And of this our state is the chief and most certain example among all nations.

5.1. When Camillus the consul was besieging Falerii, the schoolmaster led most of the boys, and the most noble, out as if for the sake of a walk, and conducted them into the camp of the Romans. When these had been intercepted, there was no doubt that the Faliscans, laying aside their persistence in waging war, would surrender themselves to our commander. On this account the senate decreed that the boys, beating their bound master with rods, should be sent back into their fatherland. By this justice the minds of those were captured whose walls could not be stormed: for the Faliscans, conquered by a benefit rather than by arms, opened their gates to the Romans. The same state, having several times rebelled and always been crushed by adverse battles, was at last compelled to surrender itself to the consul Quintus Lutatius. The Roman people, desiring to rage against it, after it was taught by Papirius—by whose hand, at the consul's order, the terms of surrender had been written—that the Faliscans had committed themselves not to the power but to the good faith of the Romans, laid aside all its anger with a calm mind, and alike opposed both the forces of hatred, not easily accustomed to be conquered, and the compliance of victory, which most readily supplies license, lest it should be wanting to its own justice. The same people, when Publius Claudius had, under his leadership and auspices, captured the people of Camerinum and sold them under the spear, although it observed that the treasury had been enriched with money, the borders with lands, yet, because that deed seemed to have been done by the commander with too little clear good faith, sought them out with the greatest care, ransomed them, and assigned to them a place on the Aventine for dwelling and restored their estates. It even allotted money for the building of shrines and the performance of sacrifices, and by the most ready maintenance of justice brought it about that they could rejoice in their own destruction, because they had thus been born again. The things which I have related thus far concerning our walls and neighbouring regions . . . ; what follows flowed forth through the whole world. Timochares of Ambracia promised the consul Fabricius that he would kill Pyrrhus by poison, through his own son, who was in charge of his drinks. When this matter had been laid before the senate, having sent envoys, it warned Pyrrhus to conduct himself more cautiously against snares of this kind, mindful that a city founded by the son of Mars ought to wage its wars with arms, not with poisons. But it suppressed the name of Timochares, embracing equity in both ways, because it wished neither to remove an enemy by a bad example nor to betray the man who had been prepared to deserve well.

5.2. The highest justice was discerned also in four tribunes of the plebs at the same time: for when, for Lucius Atratinus—under whose leadership they, with the rest of the knights, had restored our line, which had been bent back by the Volscians at Verrugo—their colleague Lucius Hortensius had named a day before the people, they swore before the rostra that they would be in mourning so long as their commander was a defendant: for those outstanding young men could not endure to behold, retaining the insignia of their office and clad in the toga, the extreme peril of him whose danger, armed, they had defended with their wounds and their blood. Moved by this justice, the assembly compelled Hortensius to desist from his prosecution; nor . . . showed itself by the deed which follows.

5.3. When Tiberius Gracchus and Gaius Claudius had exasperated the greater part of the state on account of a censorship conducted too severely, Publius Popilius the tribune of the plebs named a day for them before the people on a charge of treason, kindled, beyond the common consternation, also by private anger, because they had ordered a kinsman of his, Rutilius, to demolish a wall from public ground. In this trial very many centuries of the first class were openly condemning Claudius, while about the acquittal of Gracchus they all seemed to agree. He swore in a clear voice that, if a graver verdict were passed about his colleague, he would, in like deeds, undergo with him the same penalty of exile; and by this justice all that storm was driven away from the fortunes and lives of both: for the people acquitted Claudius, and to Gracchus Popilius remitted the pleading of his cause.

5.4. Great praise that college of tribunes too bore, in that, when one of its number, Lucius Cotta, relying on his sacrosanct power, was unwilling to satisfy his creditors, it decreed that, if he neither paid the money nor furnished someone with whom a wager might be made, it would aid the creditors who appealed to it, holding it unjust that the public majesty should be a screen for private bad faith. And so the tribunician justice dragged Cotta out of the tribunate as out of some sanctuary in which he was lurking.

5.5. To pass to another equally illustrious act of it: Gnaeus Domitius the tribune of the plebs called into the judgment of the people Marcus Scaurus, the chief man of the state, so that, if fortune favoured, he might gain an increase of fame by the ruin, or if not, certainly by the very disparagement of a most ample man. When he was burning with the greatest zeal to crush him, a slave of Scaurus came to him by night, promising that he would furnish his accusation with many and grave charges against his master. There were in the same breast both an enemy and Domitius, weighing the wicked information by a divided estimation. Justice conquered hatred: for at once, both his own ears barred and the informer's mouth closed, he ordered him to be led to Scaurus. An accuser to be, I will not say loved, but certainly praised even by his own defendant! Whom the people, both on account of his other virtues and on this account, more gladly made consul and censor and chief pontiff.

5.6. Nor did Lucius Crassus behave otherwise in the same trial of justice. He had laid the charge against Gnaeus Carbo with a hostile mind, as one most inimical to himself; but yet, when Carbo's writing-case had been brought to him by a slave, containing many things by which he could easily be crushed, just as it was sealed he sent it back to him with the slave in chains. By what reasoning, then, may we believe justice to have flourished among friends in those days, when we see it to have held such strength even among accusers and defendants?

5.7. Now Lucius Sulla wished not so much himself to be safe as Sulpicius Rufus to be ruined, harassed without any end by his tribunician fury. But when he had learned that Sulpicius, proscribed and lurking in a country house, had been betrayed by a slave, he ordered the slave freed—a parricide, that the good faith of his own edict might stand—to be hurled at once from the Tarpeian Rock with that cap of liberty gained by his crime: otherwise an insolent victor, in this command most just.

5e.1. But that we may not seem to have forgotten foreign justice: Pittacus of Mytilene, to whose merits the citizens owed so much, or to whose character they so trusted, that they conferred the tyranny on him by their own votes, held that command only so long as the war over Sigeum had to be waged with the Athenians. But after peace was won by victory, at once, the Mytileneans crying out against it, he laid it down, lest he should remain master of the citizens longer than the necessity of the commonwealth had demanded. And even when half of the recovered land was offered him by the consent of all, he turned his mind away from that gift, judging it base to diminish the glory of his virtue by the magnitude of the booty.

5e.2. Now I must relate the prudence of one man, that the justice of another may be represented. When by a most salutary counsel Themistocles had compelled the Athenians to migrate onto their fleet, and, King Xerxes and his forces having been driven from Greece, he was reshaping the ruins of his fatherland into their former state and nourishing its resources by secret machinations toward seizing the leadership of Greece, he said in the assembly that he had a matter provided for by his own deliberation which, if fortune allowed it to be carried into effect, nothing would be greater or more powerful than the Athenian people, but that it ought not to be made public, and he demanded that someone be given to him, to whom he might secretly set it forth. Aristides was given. After he learned the matter—that Themistocles wished to burn the fleet of the Lacedaemonians, which was wholly drawn up at Gytheum, so that, it being consumed, the dominion of the sea might fall to the Athenians—he went forward to the citizens and reported that Themistocles was revolving in his mind a plan as useful as it was by no means just. On the spot the whole assembly proclaimed that what did not seem equitable was not even expedient, and at once ordered Themistocles to desist from his undertaking.

5e.3. There is nothing braver even than those examples of justice. Zaleucus, having fortified the city of the Locrians with most salutary and most useful laws, when his son, condemned on a charge of adultery, ought, according to the law established by himself, to be deprived of both eyes, and the whole state, in honour of the father, was remitting the necessity of the penalty to the young man, for some time resisted. At last, overcome by the prayers of the people, having had first his own eye plucked out, then his son's, he left the use of seeing to both. Thus he rendered to the law the due measure of punishment, by an admirable tempering of equity dividing himself between a merciful father and a just lawgiver.

5e.4. But somewhat more abrupt and more curt was the justice of Charondas of Thurii. He had pacified the seditious assemblies of the citizens, which went even to violence and bloodshed, by guarding against it with a law that, if anyone entered them with a weapon, he should at once be killed. Then, after an interval of time, returning home from a distant farm girt with a sword, an assembly being suddenly proclaimed, he went into it just as he was; and being warned by one who stood nearest that he had loosed his own law, he said, "I will ratify the same law," and at once, drawing the sword which he had, fell upon it; and although it was permitted to him either to dissemble his fault or to defend it as an error, he yet preferred to enforce the penalty, lest any wrong should be done to justice.

6.pr. ON PUBLIC GOOD FAITH Whose image being set before our eyes, the venerable divinity of Good Faith displays her right hand, the most certain pledge of human safety. That it has always flourished in our state both all nations have felt, and let us recall it by a few examples.

6.1. When King Ptolemy had left the Roman people as guardian to his son, the senate sent Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, chief pontiff, twice consul, to Alexandria to undertake the guardianship of the boy, and willed that the holiness of a most ample and most upright man, engaged in the uses and sacred rites of the commonwealth, should have leisure for a foreign administration, lest the good faith of our state should be thought to have been sought in vain. By his benefit the royal cradle, alike preserved and adorned, left it uncertain to Ptolemy whether he ought to glory more in his father's fortune or in the majesty of his guardians.

6.2. Splendid too was that Roman good faith. When a huge fleet of the Carthaginians had been conquered around Sicily, its commanders, with broken spirits, were debating plans of seeking peace. Of these, Hamilcar said that he did not dare go to the consuls, lest chains should be cast upon him in the same manner in which they had been cast by them upon the consul Cornelius Asina. But Hanno, a surer estimator of the Roman temper, judging that nothing of the kind was to be feared, made his way with the greatest confidence to a conference with them. When he was treating with them about the end of the war, and a military tribune had said to him that what had befallen Cornelius could deservedly happen to him, both consuls, having ordered the tribune to be silent, said, "From that fear, Hanno, the good faith of our state frees you." It had made them famous to have been able to bind so great a commander of the enemy, but it made them far more famous to have been unwilling to.

6.3. Against these same enemies the senators displayed an equal good faith in protecting the law of embassy: for in the consulship of Marcus Aemilius Lepidus and Lucius Flaminius they took care that Lucius Minucius and Lucius Manlius should be surrendered, through the fetials, by Marcus Claudius the praetor, to the envoys of the Carthaginians, because they had laid hands upon them. The senate then regarded itself, not those to whom this was rendered.

6.4. Following his example, the elder Africanus, when he had reduced into his power a ship laden with many and illustrious men of the Carthaginians, dismissed it inviolate, because they said that they were envoys sent to him, although it was manifest that they, for the sake of avoiding the present danger, were embracing the false name of an embassy, so that the good faith of the Roman commander should be judged rather deceived than implored in vain.

6.5. Let us represent also that work of the senate by no means to be passed over. When envoys had been sent from the city of Apollonia to Rome, Quintus Fabius and Gnaeus Apronius, men of aedilician rank, a quarrel having arisen, assaulted them. When the senate learned this, it at once, through the fetials, surrendered them to the envoys, and ordered a quaestor to go with them to Brundisium, lest they should receive any injury on the way from the kinsmen of those surrendered. Who would call that senate-house a council of mortals and not a temple of Good Faith? As our state always showed it kindly, so it recognized it as steadfast also in the minds of its allies.

6e.1. After the pitiable slaughter of the two Scipios in Spain and of as many armies of Roman blood, the Saguntines, driven by the victorious arms of Hannibal within the walls of their own city, when they could no longer ward off the Punic force, having gathered into the forum what was dearest to each, and surrounded it on all sides with kindling and set fire to it, lest they should desert our alliance, threw themselves upon the public and common pyre. I could believe that then Good Faith herself, surveying human affairs, wore a sad countenance, beholding her most persistent worship condemned, by the verdict of unjust fortune, to so bitter an end.

6e.2. By doing the same the people of Petelia earned the same honour of praise. Besieged by Hannibal, because they had been unwilling to revolt from our friendship, they sent envoys to the senate imploring aid. Help could not be brought to them, on account of the recent disaster of Cannae. But they were allowed to do what should seem most useful for their own safety. It was therefore free for them to embrace the favour of the Carthaginians. They, nevertheless, having cast out of the city the women and all the unwarlike age, that, armed, they might the longer drag out their hunger, most persistently stood upon the walls, and their whole state expired before it laid aside in any part its regard for the Roman alliance. And so it befell Hannibal to capture not Petelia, but the faithful sepulchre of Petelia.

7.1. ON THE FAITHFULNESS OF WIVES TOWARD THEIR HUSBANDS And, that we may touch also upon wifely faithfulness, Tertia Aemilia, the wife of the elder Africanus, the mother of Cornelia the mother of the Gracchi, was of such courtesy and patience that, when she knew that a little maidservant of her own was pleasing to her husband, she dissembled it, lest she, a woman, should make Africanus, the tamer of the world, a great man, a defendant on a charge of impatience; and so far was her mind from vengeance that, after the death of Africanus, she freed the maidservant and gave her in marriage to her own freedman.

7.2. Quintus Lucretius, proscribed by the triumvirs, his wife Turia kept safe from impending destruction, hidden between the vaulting and the roof of his bedchamber, with a single little maidservant aware of it, not without great danger to herself, and accomplished it by singular faithfulness, so that, while the rest of the proscribed scarcely escaped in foreign and hostile regions through the utmost torments of body and mind, he kept his safety in his bedchamber and in the bosom of his wife.

7.3. But Sulpicia, when she was being most diligently watched by her mother Julia, lest she should follow her husband Lentulus Cruscellio, proscribed by the triumvirs, into Sicily, nevertheless, having put on servile dress, with two maidservants and as many slaves, came to him by clandestine flight, and did not refuse to proscribe herself, that her faithfulness to her proscribed husband might be established.

8.pr. ON THE FAITHFULNESS OF SLAVES It remains that we relate also the faithfulness of slaves toward their masters—the less expected, the more praiseworthy.

8.1. Marcus Antonius, in the time of our grandfathers a most illustrious orator, was prosecuted as a defendant for incest. In his trial the accusers most persistently demanded a slave for examination under torture, because they contended that, when they went to commit the debauchery, a lantern had been carried before them by him. Now this slave was even then beardless and was standing in the crowd, and he saw that the matter pertained to his own torments; nor yet did he flee them. Indeed, when they had returned home, he of his own accord exhorted Antonius—more vehemently troubled and anxious on this account—to hand him over to the judges to be tortured, affirming that no word would issue from his mouth by which his master's cause might be harmed; and he kept the good faith of his promise with marvellous endurance: for, torn by very many lashes and placed on the rack, burned too with glowing plates, he overturned all the force of the accusation, the safety of the defendant being guarded. Fortune may deservedly be reproached, in that it shut up so dutiful and so brave a spirit under the name of a slave.

8.2. But the consul Gaius Marius, who had been allotted the wretched end of the siege of Praeneste, when he had vainly tried to escape through the hiding-places of a tunnel and had been grazed by a light wound from Telesinus, with whom he had resolved to die together, his own slave, that he might make him exempt from Sullan cruelty, ran through with a sword and killed, though he saw that great rewards were set before him if he should hand him over to the victors. The so timely service of his right hand yields in nothing to the dutifulness of those by whom the safety of their masters was protected, because at that time for Marius not life but death lay in the benefit.

8.3. Equally illustrious is what follows. Gaius Gracchus, that he might not come into the power of his enemies, offered his neck to his slave Philocrates to be cut. When he had cut it off with a swift stroke, he drove the sword, dripping with his master's blood, through his own vitals. Some think this man was called Euporus: I dispute nothing about the name; I only admire the strength of servile faithfulness. If the noble young man had imitated his presence of mind, he would have avoided the impending punishments by his own benefit, not his slave's: as it is, he brought it about that the corpse of Philocrates lay more splendidly than that of Gracchus.

8.4. Another nobility, another madness, but a like example of faithfulness. Pindarus, lately freed by him, by his own order dispatched Gaius Cassius, defeated in the battle of Philippi, and snatched him from the insulting of the enemy, and took himself out of the sight of men by a voluntary death, so that not even the body of him thus made away with was found. Which of the gods, the avenger of the most grievous crime, bound with so great a torpor that right hand which had blazed forth to the slaying of the parent of his fatherland, that, trembling, it submitted itself to the knees of Pindarus, lest it should pay, by the arbitration of a dutiful victory, the penalties which it deserved for public parricide? You, indeed, then, deified Julius, exacted from your heavenly wounds the due vengeance, by compelling the head treacherous toward you to become the suppliant of sordid help, driven by such a tempest of mind that it neither wished to keep its life nor dared to end it by its own hand.

8.5. To these disasters Gaius Plotius Plancus joined himself, the brother of Munatius Plancus the consular and censorian. He, when, proscribed by the triumvirs, he was lurking in the region of Salernum, by a too delicate manner of life and by the scent of perfume betrayed the hidden guardianship of his safety: for by these traces a keen care, brought to bear by those who were pursuing the wretched, scented out the hidden lair of his flight. The slaves of the man in hiding, having been seized and much and long tortured by them, denied that they knew where their master was. Then Plancus could not endure that slaves so faithful and of so good an example should be tortured any longer, but came forward into the midst and offered his throat to the swords of the soldiers. Which contest of mutual goodwill makes it hard to discern whether the master was the worthier, in experiencing so steadfast a faithfulness of his slaves, or the slaves, in being freed by so just a pity of their master from the savagery of the examination.

8.6. What of the slave of Urbinus Panapio, of how admirable faithfulness! When he had learned that soldiers, made aware by the information of the household, had come to the villa at Reate to kill his proscribed master, having exchanged clothing with him, and exchanged his ring too, he secretly sent him out by the back door, but withdrew himself into the bedchamber and the bed and suffered himself to be killed as if he were Panapio. The narration of this deed is brief, but no small matter for praise: for if anyone wishes to set before his eyes the sudden onrush of the soldiers, the wrenched bars of the door, the menacing voice, the fierce faces, the gleaming arms, he will follow the matter with a true estimation, and will not think that, as quickly as it is told that someone wished to die for another, so easily too the thing could be done. Panapio confessed how much he owed to his slave, by making him an ample monument and by rendering the testimony of his devotion in a grateful inscription.

8.7. I should be content with the examples of this kind, did not admiration of the deed compel me to add one. Antius Restio, proscribed by the triumvirs, when he saw all his household occupied around plunder and booty, having dissembled his flight as much as he could, withdrew himself from his household gods in the dead of night. His furtive departure a slave of his—one who had been restrained by him with the penalty of chains and branded, with the utmost insult to his face, with the inexpiable mark of letters—observed with watchful eyes, and, following his footsteps as they wandered hither and thither with benevolent zeal, crept up as a voluntary companion to his side. By that so refined and so risky a service he had filled up the most perfect heap of unexpected devotion: for, while those whose station in the house had been more fortunate were intent on gain, he himself—nothing but the shadow and image of his punishments—judged the safety of him by whom he had been so grievously punished to be his greatest profit, and, when it would have been abundant to remit his anger, he added even affection. Nor did his goodwill proceed thus far only, but in preserving him he used marvellous skill too: for when he perceived soldiers, greedy for blood, coming upon them, having removed his master, he built a pyre and threw upon it an old man, in want, seized and killed by him. Then, when the soldiers asked where Antius was, stretching his hand toward the pyre he answered that he was being burned there, having paid him the due expiations of his cruelty. Because he spoke things like the truth, his voice was believed. Whence it came about that Antius obtained a safe occasion of seeking his preservation.

9.pr. ON THE CHANGE OF CHARACTER OR FORTUNE The change of character and of fortune, recognized in famous men, can add much both of confidence to the minds of men and take away much of anxiety, whether we contemplate our own states or those of our neighbours: for since, by looking at the fortunes of others, we see that fame has emerged from a station abject and despised, what will be wanting to prevent us too from always thinking better things of ourselves, mindful that it is foolish to condemn oneself in advance to perpetual unhappiness, and at times to turn into certain despair a hope which, even when uncertain, is rightly cherished?

9.1. Manlius Torquatus, in the beginnings of his youth thought of so dull and blunted a wit that by his father Lucius Manlius, a most ample man, because he seemed useless both for domestic and for public services, he was relegated to the country and wearied with rustic toil, afterwards freed his father, a defendant, from judicial peril, struck with the axe his son, a victor, because against his command he had joined hands with the enemy, and restored his fatherland, weary with the Latin tumult, by a most splendid triumph—in this cloud, I believe, of the contempt of his adolescence steeped, that the glory of his old age might shine forth more brightly.

9.2. But the elder Scipio Africanus, whom the immortal gods willed to be born so that there should be one in whom virtue might effectively show itself to men through all its measures, is said to have passed the first years of his adolescence in a rather loose life—removed indeed from the charge of luxury, but yet more tender than the Punic trophies and the yoke imposed on the necks of conquered Carthage.

9.3. Gaius Valerius Flaccus too, in the times of the Second Punic War, began an adolescence ruined by luxury. But made a flamen by Publius Licinius the chief pontiff, that he might the more easily withdraw from his vices, his mind turned to the care of the sacred rites and ceremonies, using the religion of frugality as his guide, he proved afterward as great a model of self-restraint and holiness as he had before been an example of luxury.

9.4. Nothing did our state hold, in that age, more infamous than Quintus Fabius Maximus—who by his Gallic victory won the surname Allobrogicus for himself and his posterity—as a young man; nothing more honoured or more splendid than the same man as an old man.

9.5. Who is ignorant that the authority of Quintus Catulus held a lofty step in the greatest crop of most illustrious men? If his earlier age be reviewed, many sports, many indulgences would be found. These indeed were no hindrance to him from becoming the chief man of his fatherland, and from his name shining on the Capitoline summit, and from his virtue burying, with immense upheaval, a civil war as it was arising.

9.6. But Lucius Sulla led, up to the elections of his own quaestorship, a life stained with lust, wine, and the love of the theatrical art. Wherefore the consul Gaius Marius is said to have taken it grievously that to him, waging a most harsh war in Africa, so delicate a quaestor had fallen by lot. The virtue of the same man, as if having burst through and scattered the barriers of the worthlessness by which it was besieged, cast chains upon the hands of Jugurtha, checked Mithridates, repressed the floods of the Social War, broke the domination of Cinna, and compelled him who had disdained him as a quaestor in Africa to seek that very province, proscribed and an exile. If anyone should wish to weigh in his mind, by a more attentive comparison, things so diverse and so contrary to one another, he would believe that there were two Sullas in one man—a base youth and a man whom I should call brave, had he not himself preferred to be called fortunate.

9.7. And, that we may weave in, after the nobility, men who—admonished of their own selves by the benefit of repentance—dared to look back, and to hope for things higher than their station: Titus Aufidius, when he had held a very small share of the Asian revenue-contract, afterwards held all Asia with proconsular command. Nor were his allies indignant to obey the fasces of one whom they had seen flattering at the tribunals of others. He even conducted himself most uprightly and most splendidly. By which means indeed he demonstrated that his former gain ought to be imputed to fortune, but his present increase of dignity to his own character.

9.8. But Publius Rupilius did not act as a tax-farmer in Sicily, but gave his services to the tax-farmers. The same man supported his utter poverty by hiring out his labour to the contractors. From him afterwards, as consul, all the Sicilians received their laws and were freed from a most bitter war of brigands and runaways. The very harbours, if indeed there is any feeling in dumb things, admired, I think, so great a variety of state in the same man: for him whom they had observed exacting the daily catches, the same they saw giving laws and ruling fleets and armies.

9.9. To this so great an increase I shall add a greater. When Asculum was captured, Gnaeus Pompeius, the father of Magnus, brought Publius Ventidius, a boy not yet of age, before the eyes of the people in his triumph. This is that Ventidius who afterwards led a triumph at Rome over the Parthians, and through the Parthians for the shades of Crassus, lying pitiably on hostile soil. Thus he who as a captive had shuddered at prison, as a victor thronged the Capitol with good fortune. In him too was that remarkable thing, that in the same year he was made praetor and consul.

9.10. Let us now contemplate the variety of chances. Lucius Lentulus, a consular, overwhelmed under the Caecilian law on a charge of extortion, was created censor with Lucius Censorinus. Him indeed fortune turned about, by alternate vicissitude, between ornaments and disgraces, by setting condemnation after his consulship, and the censorship after his condemnation, and by suffering him neither to enjoy perpetual goods nor to groan under eternal evils.

9.11. It wished to use the same force in the case of Gnaeus Cornelius Scipio Asina. He, as consul captured by the Carthaginians at Lipara, when by the law of war he had lost everything, presently aided by its more cheerful countenance recovered all and was even created consul a second time. Who would have believed that he would pass from twelve axes to the chains of the Carthaginians? Who again would have thought that he would pass from Punic chains to the insignia of the highest command? But nevertheless from a consul he was made a captive, and from a captive a consul.

9.12. What, did not the magnitude of his money give Crassus the name of "the Rich"? But on the same man afterwards poverty branded the disgraceful appellation of a bankrupt, since indeed his goods were sold by his creditors, because he could not pay in full. And so he who did not lack the bitter sneer, when he walked about needy, was saluted "Dives" by those who met him.

9.13. Crassus, Quintus Caepio outran in bitterness of misfortune: for he, having attained by the splendour of his praetorship, the renown of his triumph, the dignity of his consulship, the priesthood of the chief pontificate, to be called the patron of the senate, laid down his breath in the public prison, and his body, mangled by the deadly hands of the executioner, was beheld lying on the Gemonian Stairs, with great horror of the whole Roman forum.

9.14. Now there is Gaius Marius, with the struggle of the greatest fortune: for all its onsets he sustained most bravely, by the strength now of body, now of mind. Judged inferior in the honours of Arpinum, he dared to seek the quaestorship at Rome. Then, by his endurance of rejections, he burst into the senate-house rather than entered it. In his candidacy for the tribunate too and the aedileship having experienced a like mark of the Campus, as a candidate for the praetorship he clung to the last place, which yet he obtained not without peril: for, accused of bribery, he scarcely and with difficulty obtained acquittal from the judges. Out of that Marius, so humble at Arpinum, so ignoble at Rome, so contemptible a candidate, emerged that Marius who subdued Africa, who drove King Jugurtha before his chariot, who destroyed the armies of the Teutons and the Cimbri, whose two trophies are beheld in the city, whose seven consulships are read in the calendars, to whom it fell, after exile, to be created consul, and, proscribed, to make a proscription. What is more inconstant or more changeable than his condition? Whom, if you place him among the wretched, you will find most wretched; if among the fortunate, most fortunate.

9.15. But Gaius Caesar, whose virtues built him an approach to heaven, in the beginnings of his first youth, a private man, seeking Asia, was taken by the pirates of the sea around the island of Pharmacusa and ransomed himself for fifty talents. For a small sum, therefore, fortune willed the most illustrious star of the world to be weighed out in a piratical skiff. What is there, then, that we should complain of it any further, if it spares not even the partners of its own divinity? But the heavenly power avenged itself of the wrong: for at once Caesar, having captured the pirates, affixed them to crosses.

9e.1. With attentive zeal we have commemorated our own affairs: now with a more relaxed mind let foreign ones be narrated. Polemo, a young man of ruined luxury at Athens, rejoicing not only in its allurements but even in its very infamy, when he had risen from a banquet not after the setting but after the rising of the sun, and, returning home, had seen the open door of Xenocrates the philosopher, heavy with wine, anointed with perfumes, his head wreathed with garlands, clad in a translucent robe, entered his school, crowded with a throng of learned men. And not content with so unseemly an entrance, he even sat down, that he might cheapen the most illustrious eloquence and the most prudent precepts by the wantonness of his drunkenness. Then, the indignation of all arising, as was fitting, Xenocrates kept his countenance in the same state and, leaving the subject he was discussing, began to speak about modesty and temperance. By the gravity of his discourse Polemo, compelled to come to his senses, first cast off the garland torn from his head, a little after drew his arm within his cloak, as time went on laid aside the convivial cheerfulness of his face, at last put off all his luxury, and, cured by the most salutary medicine of a single speech, out of an infamous reveller turned out a very great philosopher. His mind travelled abroad in worthlessness; it did not dwell there.

9e.2. It irks me to touch upon the adolescence of Themistocles, whether I look at his father imposing on him the mark of disinheritance, or at his mother compelled to end her life by hanging on account of her son's disgrace—when he afterwards proved the most illustrious of all the men of Greek blood and was the pledge, between Europe and Asia, of either hope or despair: for the one had him as the patron of its safety, the other took him as the surety of victory.

9e.3. The cradle of Cimon, indeed, was filled with the reputation of foolishness; but his salutary commands, when grown, the Athenians felt. And so he compelled them to condemn themselves of stupidity, who had believed him stolid.

9e.4. For Alcibiades two fortunes, as it were, divided between them—the one, which assigned to him outstanding nobility, abundant riches, a most excellent form, the propense favour of the citizens, the highest commands, the chief forces of power, a most blazing talent; the other, which inflicted condemnation, exile, the sale of his goods, want, the hatred of his fatherland, a violent death—and neither these nor those together, but variously interwoven, like a strait and a tide.

9e.5. The brilliance of the life of Polycrates, tyrant of the Samians, conspicuous for most abundant goods, advanced even to envy, and not without cause: for all his attempts were received on a calm course, his hopes grasped the sure fruit of the thing desired, his vows were vowed and at the same time fulfilled, to will and to be able were placed on an equality. Only once did he change his countenance, shaken by a very brief jolt of sadness, then when he deliberately threw into the deep a ring most pleasing to him, that he might not be free of all inconvenience. Yet he at once recovered it, a fish being caught which had devoured it. But this man, whose good fortune always held a prosperous course with full sails, Orontes, the prefect of King Darius, affixed to a cross on the loftiest peak of Mount Mycale—from which his rotting joints and his limbs dripping with corrupt gore, and that left hand to which Neptune had restored the ring by the hand of a fisherman, shrivelled with decay, Samos, for some time oppressed by bitter slavery, beheld with free and joyful eyes.

9e.6. But Dionysius, when he had received the tyranny of the Syracusans, and almost of all Sicily, by way of inheritance from his father—master of the greatest resources, leader of armies, ruler of fleets, powerful in cavalry—on account of poverty taught letters to little boys at Corinth, and at the same time, by so great a change, warned his elders, made a schoolmaster out of a tyrant, that no one should trust too much in fortune.

9e.7. This man King Syphax follows, who experienced a like iniquity of fortune—he whom, sought of their own accord on this side by Rome through Scipio, on that by Carthage through Hasdrubal as a friend, both had come to his household gods. But, raised to such renown that he proved almost the arbiter of victory between most powerful peoples, after the lapse of a little time he was dragged in chains by Laelius the legate to Scipio the commander, and at the knees of him whose right hand, sitting on a royal throne, he had touched with an arrogant hand, he fell down a suppliant. Frail indeed and fragile, and consonant with childish rattles, are those things which are called human powers and resources. They flow in suddenly, they slip away suddenly; in no place, in no person do they stand fixed on stable roots, but, driven hither and thither by the most uncertain breath of fortune, those whom they have raised on high, abandoned by a sudden recoil, they pitiably plunge into the deep of disasters. And so they ought neither to be deemed nor called goods which, that they may double the longing for themselves by the bitterness of inflicted evils, . . .