Читать книгу The Natural History of Pliny (Vol. 1-6) - Pliny the Elder - Страница 358

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Fortune has determined that P. Ventidius alone should enjoy the honour of a triumph over the Parthians, and yet the same individual, when he was a child, she led in the triumphal procession of Cneius Pompeius, the conqueror of Asculum.1199 Indeed, Masurius says, that he had been twice led in triumph; and according to Cicero, he used to let out mules for the bakers of the camp.1200 Most writers, indeed, admit that his younger days were passed in the greatest poverty, and that he wore the hob-nailed shoes1201 of the common soldier. Balbus Cornelius, also, the elder, was elected to the consulate;1202 but he had previously been accused, and the judges had been charged to discuss the point whether he could or not lawfully be scourged with rods; he being the first foreigner,1203—born even on the very shores of the ocean,—who obtained that honour, which our ancestors denied even to the people of Latium.1204 Among other remarkable instances, also, we have that of L. Fulvius,1205 the consul of the rebellious Tusculani, who, immediately upon his coming over to the Romans, obtained from them the same honour. He is the only individual who, in the same year in which he had been its enemy, enjoyed the honour of a triumph in Rome, and that too, over the people whose consul he had previously been.

Down to the present time, L. Sylla is the only man who has claimed to himself the surname of “Happy;”1206 a name which he derived, forsooth, from the bloodshed of the citizens and the oppression of his country! But what claim had he on which to found his title to this happiness? Was it the power which he had of proscribing and massacreing so many thousands of his fellow-citizens? Oh interpretation most disgraceful, and which must stamp him as “Unhappy”1207 to all future time! Were not the men who perished in those times, of the two, to be looked upon as the more fortunate—seeing that with them we sympathize, while there is no one who does not detest Sylla? And then, besides, was not the close of his life more horrible than the sufferings which had been experienced by any of those who had been proscribed by him? his very flesh eating into itself, and so engendering his own punishment.1208 And this, although he may have thought proper to gloss it over by that last dream of his,1209 in the very midst of which he may be said, in some measure, to have died; and in which, as he pretended, he was told that his glory alone had risen superior to all envy; though at the same time, he confessed that it was still wanting to his supreme happiness, that he had not dedicated the Capitol.1210