TRANSLATION—EX “PRO MURENA”—SECOND PART OF THE “CONTENTION.”[56]
“I recognize in you, Servius Sulpicius, all the respectability and distinction that family, character, intellectual toil, and such other accomplishments can confer, as may entitle any one to aspire to the Consulate.
“In all these respects I know Murena to be your equal; and so nicely your equal, that we can neither admit any inferiority on his part, nor concede the slightest precedency on yours.
“You have taunted Murena with his genealogy, and extolled your own. If you mean, in all this, that no one can be deemed of honorable parentage who is not a patrician, you will bring the masses [plebs, not populus] to withdraw [secede] once more to Mount Aventine. But if there are considerable and distinguished plebeian families—why, both the great-grandfather and the grandfather of Murena were actually prætors; and his father, when laying down the prætorian office, having received, in the amplest and most honorable form, the solemnity of a capitolian triumph, left thereby the more accessible to my client the avenue to the Consulate, inasmuch as it was for a dignity already earned by the father, and due to him, that the son became a candidate.
“Your nobility, Servius Sulpicius, although of the highest class, is best known to men of letters and to antiquaries; to the people and the electors, not so obvious: your father, you see, was of knightly rank; your grandfather—famous for nothing very remarkable—so that no loud modern voices, but rather the remote whispers of antiquity, attest the glories of your race. For which reason, I have ever claimed you as one of us; a man who, although but the son of a knight, yet have achieved for yourself a fair pretension to the honors of the chief magistracy in the republic.” [He means that he was not presumptuous in offering himself to the electors for the Consulate: “summâ amplitudine dignus” are the words.]
“Nor, for my part, have I ever looked upon Quintus Pompey, a new man, and bravery itself, as having less worth and dignity than Marcus Æmilius (Scaurus), one of the leaders of our aristocracy; for there is the same merit in the mind and the genius which hand down to posterity the glory of a name not inherited (and this Pompey has achieved), as to revive, like Scaurus, by personal services, the half-dead honor of an ancient line. However, I was under the impression, judges, that my own exertions had succeeded in rendering the objection of lowly birth obsolete in the case of persons of merit—persons who, if we recall not merely the Curii, the Catos, the Pompeys, of a former age, architects of their own station, and men of the loftiest spirit, but the Mariuses, the Didii, the Cœliuses of almost yesterday, had been left lying in the shade. But when, after so long an interval, I myself had stormed those fastnesses of nobility, and had struck wide-open for the admission of merit not less than of nobility, in the time to come (as they used to be among our ancestors), the approaches to the Consulate, I certainly did not expect, while a ‘designated’ consul, sprung from an ancient and illustrious family, was defended by an actual consul, the son of a Roman knight” [Cicero was himself at that moment vested with the Consulate], “that the accusers would venture to taunt him with the newness of his origin! For, indeed, it was my own lot to be candidate for the chief magistracy in competition with two eminent patricians, one of them as conspicuous for the abandoned audacity of his wickedness, as the other for his modesty and virtue—and to vanquish both: Catiline, by the respect in which my character was held; and Galba, in the love and confidence of the people. And, surely, had it amounted to any reproach to be a new man, I lacked neither enemies nor enviers. Let us drop, then, this discussion about family, a point in which the present competitors are both alike distinguished; let us see what the other allegations are. ‘Murena sought the Quæstorship with me: and I was made Quæstor first.’ An answer is not expected to be given to every little nothing; nor does it escape any of you, when a number of persons obtain simultaneously the same grade of the magistracy, while only one of them can stand first on the list of announcements, that to be first declared in point of time is not the same thing as to be declared first in point of rank; for the obvious reason, that there must be earlier and later entries in every catalogue, although each name on it bears, for the most part, the very same honor. But the quæstorships of both pretty nearly coincide as to the ‘partition’” [of region]: “my client, under the Titian law, had a silent and quiet province; you, that Ostian province at the mention of which the people, when quæstors are drawing lots, usually utter shouts—not so much a favorite or distinguished, as a busy and troublesome department. The names of each of you continued dormant in quæstorships; for fortune gave to neither a field wherein your valor might respectively have been exercised and displayed. The ulterior periods of time which are brought into rivalry were by each of you very differently spent. Servius pursued here, along with us, this civic warfare of replications, pleas, caveats; replete with care and vexations; learnt the civic law; kept late watches; toiled hard; was the servant of every one; endured the stupidities, bore with the arrogance, was surfeited with the perplexities of hundreds; lived at the will of others, not according to his own. It is highly honorable, and wins men’s favor, that one man should labor in a pursuit which is useful to so many others. And all this while, how was Murena engaged? He was serving as adjutant-general to the bravest and wisest of men, a consummate captain, Lucius Lucullus, in which service he led the army, engaged the enemy, was repeatedly [often] at close quarters with him; routed large forces; took cities now by storm, now by siege; so traversed that opulent Asia, that Asia famed for its seductions, as to leave behind him not one trace either of care for its wealth or pursuit after its gaieties; in short, during a war of the first magnitude, played such a part, that, while he shared, and shared with distinction, in every achievement of the commander-in-chief, the commander-in-chief had no part in numerous and notable services of his. Although I speak in Lucullus’ own presence, yet, lest it should be supposed that he allows me, on account of Murena’s actual danger in this prosecution, to exaggerate his merits, let me remind you that everything I state rests upon official and public evidence—evidence in which Lucullus awards to his second in command an amount of credit which never could have proceeded except from the most candid and the least jealous of chiefs. Each of the present competitors possesses every title both to personal respect and to social position; and I would pronounce them equal, if only Servius allowed me. But he will not allow me. He persists in his quarrel with soldiering; he inveighs against the whole of Murena’s adjutant-generalship. He will have it that the supreme magistracy is the natural reward of this, his desk and chambers [assiduitatis, etymologically sitting-ness] work; these daily labors of his. ‘What!’ quoth he, ‘you will have been with the army all these years; you will never have been seen in the Forum; and then, after such a disappearance, you pretend to compete for the highest dignities with men who have spent their lives in the Forum?’ In the first place, Servius, you are not aware how irksome, how wearisome to people, this assiduity of ours is. To me, indeed, the ‘in sight, in mind’ brought with it its conveniences; but I surmounted the danger of tiring people by my immense laboriousness: you may have done the same; but a little less of our everlasting presence would have hurt neither of us.
“However, passing over this, let us come to the comparison of your several studies and acquirements. How can there be any doubt, but that warlike glory carries with it far more likelihood than that of the law to win the Consulate? You keep night-watches, that you may give an opinion to your consulting clients; he, that he may reach his destination in good time with his army. You awake in the morning to the crowing of the cocks; he is called by the battle-breathing trumpets. You array pleadings; he, armies. You are careful not to let your clients be captured; he, to keep from capture cities and camps. He studies how the enemies’ forces, and you how neighbors’ drains and roof-rains, may be held at bay. He knows how to extend our boundaries; and you, how to litigate about our ‘boundings and buttings’”—Cætera desunt, hic.