I’m labelling all the posts on this topic as level 2, the
reason being that crime ‘reports’ – both now and in Rome –frequently use the
passive e.g. he was murdered, he was arrested etc.
and so it is a good topic from the point of view of looking in more depth at
the passive voice, and since this is the last topic of level 2, as well as being
a way in to reading original literature. Crime, immoral behaviour and killing
in a military context are common themes.
The Latin for the passage below will come in time. Meanwhile
we could make a TV series out of this …
“Oppianicus was a man who was convicted of having tampered
with the public registers of his own municipality, of having made erasures in a
will, of having substituted another person in order to accomplish the forgery
of a will, of having murdered the man whose name he had put to the will, of
having thrown into slavery and into prison the uncle of his own son and then
murdered him, of having contrived to get his own fellow-citizens proscribed and
murdered, of having married the wife of the man whom he had murdered, of having
given money for poisoning, of having murdered his mother-in-law and his wife,
of having murdered at one time his brother's wife, the children who were
expected, and his own brother himself,— lastly, of having murdered his own
children; as he was a man who was manifestly detected in procuring poison for
his son-in-law, — who, when his assistants and accomplices had been condemned,
and when he himself was prosecuted, gave money to one of the judges to
influence by bribes the votes of the other judges.” (Cicero: pro Cluentio)
It might have been quicker for Cicero to have listed what
Oppianicus hadn’t done.
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