We have said enough--perhaps too much--to frame the little picture which we want to present to our readers; to set it near the right window as you pass. That little picture is the argument in which Cicero (_who was on terms of personal intimacy with the prosecutor, as well as with his gallant client_) firmly questions--yet questions with the most exquisite urbanity--the rather exorbitant pretensions of Sulpicius, the “learned conveyancer and special pleader,” to a higher consideration than “ought to be, or could be,” allowed to the instruction, the knowledge of many sorts (geographical, historical, administrative, tactical, and technical--ay, strategical even--and of characters; of general statistics; of actual local supplies; of incidental resources, material and moral), and to the professional industry, to the labors, the wounds, the dangers, to say nothing of the valor and the genius of a patriotic and public-spirited soldier, who had led armies to victory, had stormed great strongholds, and had not only defended the frontier of the empire, but enlarged it, with every circumstance of legitimate splendor and honorable success.
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.