M. Tullius Cicero, For Sulla
C. D. Yonge, Ed.

On account, therefore, of this great dissimilarity between the men and the cases, I also behaved in a different manner to them both. For Autronius came to me, and he was constantly coming to me, with many tears, as a suppliant, to beg me to defend him, and he used to remind me that he had been my school-fellow in my childhood, my friend in my youth, and my colleague in the quaestorship. He used to enumerate many services which I had done him, and some also which he had done me. By all which circumstances, O judges, I was so much swayed and influenced, that I banished from my recollection all the plots which he had laid against me myself; that I forgot that Caius Cornelius had been lately sent by him for the purpose of killing me in my own house, in the sight of my wife and children. And if he had formed these designs against me alone, such is my softness and lenity of disposition, that I should never have been able to resist his tears and entreaties; [19] but when the thoughts of my country, of your dangers, of this city, of all those shrines and temples which we see around us, of the infant children, and matrons, and virgins of the city occurred to me, and when those hostile and fatal torches destined for the entire conflagration of the whole city, when the arms which had been collected, when the slaughter and blood of the citizens, when the ashes of my country began to present themselves to my eyes, and to excite my feelings by the recollection, then I resisted him, then I resisted not only that enemy of his country, that parricide himself, but I withstood also his relations the Marcelli, father and son, one of whom was regarded by me with the respect due to a parent, and the other with the affection which one feels towards a son. And I thought that I could not, without being guilty of the very greatest wickedness, defend in their companion the same crimes which I had chastised in the case of others, when I knew him to be guilty. [20] And, on the same principle, I could not endure to see Publius Sulla coming to me as a suppliant, or these same Marcelli in tears at his danger nor could I resist the entreaties of Marcus Messala, whom you see in court, a most intimate friend of my own. For neither was his cause disagreeable to my natural disposition nor had the man or the facts anything in them at variance with my feelings of clemency his name had never been mentioned, there was no trace whatever of him in the conspiracy; no information had touched him, no suspicion had been breathed of him. I undertook his cause, O Torquatus; I undertook it, and I did so willingly, in order that, while good men had always, as I hope, thought me virtuous and firm, not even bad men might he able to call me cruel.