1Let this law, then, be established in friendship: that we neither ask for shameful things nor do them when asked. 1For it is a shameful excuse, and one by no means to be accepted, both in other wrongdoings and above all if someone should confess that he acted against the state for a friend's sake. 1For we have been placed, Fannius and Scaevola, in such a position that we ought to look far ahead to the future misfortunes of the state. 1The custom of our ancestors has already swerved somewhat from its track and course. 41Tiberius 41Gracchus tried to seize kingly power, or rather he actually reigned for a few months.
41Had the Roman people ever heard or seen anything like it? 41What his friends and kinsmen, following him even after his death, did in the case of Publius Scipio, I cannot tell without tears. 41For Carbo, in whatever way we could, because of the recent punishment of Tiberius 41Gracchus, we held in check. 41What I expect from the tribunate of Gaius Gracchus I do not care to foretell; 41then the thing creeps on, and once it has begun, it slides headlong towards ruin. 41You see what havoc has already been wrought in the matter of the ballot, first by the Gabinian law, and two years later by the Cassian. 41I seem to see already the people estranged from the senate, and the greatest affairs conducted at the whim of the mob.
41For more men will learn how such things are done than how they are resisted. 42What is the point of all this? 42That no one attempts anything of this kind without allies. 42Good men must therefore be taught that, 42if by some chance they have fallen unawares into friendships of this sort, they should not think themselves so bound that they do not withdraw from friends who are doing wrong in some important public matter; 42for the wicked, on the other hand, a penalty must be fixed, and no lighter for those who have followed another than for those who were themselves the leaders of the impiety. 42Who in Greece was more famous than Themistocles, who more powerful?
42When, as general in the Persian War, he had freed Greece from slavery and had been driven into exile through ill will, he did not bear the injustice of his ungrateful country, as he ought to have borne it: he did the same as Coriolanus had done among us twenty years before. 42No one was found to help these men against their country; 42and so each of them took his own life. 43Wherefore such a league of wicked men must not only not be covered by the excuse of friendship, but must rather be punished with every kind of penalty, so that no one may think it permitted to follow a friend even when he is making war on his country.
43And indeed, the way things have begun to go, I rather think this may one day happen; 43but it is no less my concern what the state will be like after my death than what it is like today.