1If — and may Jupiter avert the omen! 1you strike him down with your votes, where will the poor man turn? 1home? 1to see that likeness of a most distinguished man, his father, which a few days ago he saw crowned with laurel at his celebration, now disfigured with disgrace and in mourning? 1Or to his mother, who, poor woman, lately kissed her son as consul and is now tormented and anxious lest she should soon see that same son stripped of all dignity? 89But why do I speak of his mother or his home, when the new penalty of the law deprives him of home and parent and of the company and sight of all his own?
89Will the poor man, then, go into exile? 89Where? 89to the regions of the East, in which he served for many years as legate, led armies, performed the greatest deeds? 89But it is a great grief to return in disgrace to the place you left with honour. 89Or will he hide himself in the opposite part of the world, so that Transalpine Gaul, which lately saw him with the greatest delight in supreme command, should see the same man mourning, grieving, an exile? 89In that province, moreover, with what feelings will he look upon his brother Murena? 89What will be this man's grief, what that man's sorrow, what the lamentation of both, and how great the reversal of fortune and of talk, when, in the places where a few days before messengers and letters had celebrated Murena's election as consul, and from which guests and friends were hurrying to Rome to congratulate him, he suddenly appears himself as the messenger of his own disaster!
90If these things are bitter, if wretched, if mournful, if utterly foreign to your gentleness and pity, judges, preserve the favour of the Roman people, restore to the state its consul, grant this to his own modesty, grant it to his dead father, grant it to his race and family, grant it also to Lanuvium, a most honourable town, which you have seen throughout this whole case present in numbers and in mourning. 90Do not tear away from the ancestral rites of Juno Sospita, to whom all consuls must sacrifice, the one consul who is above all her own and from her own home. 90And I, as consul commending a consul, judges, commend him to you, if my recommendation has any weight or my assurance any authority, in such a way that I promise and guarantee that he will be most desirous of peace, most devoted to the good, most vigorous against sedition, bravest in war, and most hostile to this conspiracy which is now shaking the state.