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Notes Do not display Latin text | Translated by Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb Book III Chapter 51: Vitellius versus Antonius Primus. On civil wars[AD 69] | Next chapter Return to index Previous chapter |
| I have the very highest authority for asserting, that there was among the conquerors such an impious disregard of right and wrong, that a private cavalry soldier declared he had slain his brother in the late battle, and claimed a reward from the generals. The common law of humanity on the one hand forbade them to reward this act of blood, the necessities of the war on the other forbade them to punish it. They put him off, on the ground that the obligation was too great to be immediately discharged. Nothing more is recorded. In the earlier civil wars indeed a similar horror had occurred. In the battle with Cinna at the Janiculum, a soldier in Pompey's army, as Sisenna tells us, slew his own brother, and, on discovering the horrible deed he had committed, destroyed himself. So much more earnest among our ancestors was the honour paid to virtue, and the remorse that waited on crime. These and like instances, drawn from the recollections of the past, I shall mention not irrelevantly, whenever the subject and the occasion shall call for some example of goodness or some solace in the presence of evil. | Celeberrimos auctores habeo tantam victoribus adversus fas nefasque inreverentiam fuisse ut gregarius eques occisum a se proxima acie fratrem professus praemium a ducibus petierit. nec illis aut honorare eam caedem ius hominum aut ulcisci ratio belli permittebat. distulerant tamquam maiora meritum quam quae statim exolverentur; nec quidquam ultra traditur. ceterum et prioribus civium bellis par scelus inciderat. nam proelio, quo apud Ianiculum adversus Cinnam pugnatum est, Pompeianus miles fratrem suum, dein cognito facinore se ipsum interfecit, ut Sisenna memorat: tanto acrior apud maiores, sicut virtutibus gloria, ita flagitiis paenitentia fuit. sed haec aliaque ex vetere memoria petita, quotiens res locusque exempla recti aut solacia mali poscet, haud absurde memorabimus. |