In C. Verrem

“Accounts rendered to Publius Lentulus, and Lucius Triarius, quaestors of the city.” Read on—“According to the decree of the senate.” In order to be allowed to give in accounts in such a manner as this, he became one of Sulla's party in an instant, and not for the sake of contributing to the restoration of honour and dignity to the nobility. Even if you had deserted empty-handed, still your desertion would be decided to be wicked, your betrayal of your consul, infamous. Oh, Cnaeus Carbo was a bad citizen, a scandalous consul, a seditious man. He may have been so to others: when did he begin to be so to you? After he entrusted to you the money, the supplying of corn, all his accounts, and his army; for if he had displeased you before that, you would have done the same as Marcus Piso did the year after. When he had fallen by lot to Lucius Scipio, as consul, he never touched the money, he never joined the army at all. The opinions he embraced concerning the republic he embraced so as to do no violence to his own good faith, to the customs of our ancestors, nor to the obligations imposed on him by the lot which he had drawn.

In truth, if we wish to disturb all these things, and to throw them into confusion, we shall render life full of danger, intrigue, and enmity; if such allurements are to have no scruples to protect them; if the connection between men in prosperous and doubtful fortunes is to cause no friendship; if the customs and principles of our ancestors are to have no authority. He is the common enemy of all men who has once been the enemy of his own connections. No wise man ever thought that a traitor was to be trusted; Sulla himself, to whom the arrival of the fellow ought to have been most acceptable, removed him from himself and from his army: he ordered him to remain at Beneventum, among those men whom he believed to be exceedingly friendly to his party, where he could do no harm to his cause and could have no influence on the termination of the war. Afterwards, indeed, he rewarded him liberally; he allowed him to seize some estates of men who had been proscribed lying in the territory of Beneventum; he loaded him with honour as a traitor; he put no confidence in him as a friend.

Now, although there are men who hate Cnaeus Carbo, though dead, yet they ought to think, not what they were glad to have happen, but what they themselves would have to fear in a similar case. This is a misfortune common to many a cause for alarm, and a danger common to many. There are no intrigues more difficult to guard against than those which are concealed under a pretence of duty, or under the name of some intimate connection. For you can easily avoid one who is openly an adversary, by guarding against him; but this secret, internal, and domestic evil not only exists, but even overwhelms you before you can foresee it or examine into it. Is it not so?

When you were sent as quaestor to the army, not only as guardian of the money, but also of the consul; when you were the sharer in all his business and of all his counsels, when you were considered by him as one of his own children, according to the tenor of the principles of our ancestors; could you on a sudden leave him? desert him? pass over to the enemy? O wickedness! O monster to be banished to the very end of the world! For that nature which has committed such an atrocity as this cannot be contented with this one crime alone. It must be always contriving something of this sort; it must be occupied in similar audacity and perfidy.

Therefore, that same fellow whom Cnaeus Dolabella afterwards, when Caius Malleolus had been slain, had for his quaestor, (I know not whether this connection was not even a closer one than the connection with Carbo, and whether the consideration of his having been voluntarily chosen is not stronger than that of his having been chosen by lot,) behaved to Cnaeus Dolabella in the same manner as he had behaved in to Cnaeus Carbo. For, the charges which properly touched himself, he transferred to his shoulders; and gave information of everything connected with his cause to his enemies and accusers. He himself gave most hostile and most infamous evidence against the man to whom he had been lieutenant and pro-quaestor. Dolabella, unfortunate as he was, through his abominable betrayal, through his infamous and false testimony, was injured far more than by either, by the odium created by that fellow's own thefts and atrocities.

What can you do with such a man? or what hope can you allow so perfidious, so ill-omened an animal to entertain? One who despised and trampled on the lot which bound him to Cnaeus Carbo, the choice which connected him with Cnaeus Dolabella, and not only deserted them both, but also betrayed and attacked them. Do not, I beg of you, O judges, judge of his crimes by the brevity of my speech rather than by the magnitude of the actions themselves. For I am forced to make haste in order to have time to set before you all the things which I have resolved to relate to you. Wherefore, now that his quaestorship has been put before you, saw that the dishonesty and wickedness of his first conduct in his first office has been thoroughly seen, listen, I pray you, to the remainder.