1I see that in you, Servius Sulpicius, there is the highest distinction of birth, integrity, diligence and all the other qualities relying on which a man may fittingly enter on a candidature for the consulship. 1I recognise that these qualities are equal in Murena, and so equal that neither could he have been surpassed by you in standing nor has he surpassed you in standing. 1You disparaged Murena's family and extolled your own. 1On this point, if you assume that no one is of good birth unless he is a patrician, you make it seem that the plebs must once again secede to the Aventine. 1But if there are distinguished and honourable plebeian families, both Murena's great-grandfather and his grandfather were praetors, and his father, after celebrating a most splendid and honourable triumph following his praetorship, left this man an easier step to winning the consulship, because the son was seeking what was already owed to his father.
16Your nobility, Servius Sulpicius, though it is of the highest, is better known to men of letters and antiquarians, but less known to the people and the voters. 16For your father was of equestrian rank, your grandfather celebrated for no illustrious distinction. 16So the record of your nobility must be dug out not from the recent talk of men but from the antiquity of the annals. 16For this reason I always count you among our number, because by your merit and diligence you brought it about that, though you were the son of a Roman knight, you were nevertheless thought worthy of the highest eminence. 16Nor has there ever seemed to me less merit in Pompeius, a new man and a very brave one, than in that most noble man, Aemilius.
16Indeed, it belongs to the same spirit and talent to hand down to one's descendants, as Pompeius did, a distinguished name which one did not inherit, and, like Scaurus, to renew by one's own merit the almost extinct memory of one's family.