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Cicero de Senectute.
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your father, Scipio, the father-in-law of that excellent man, my son, do nothing? Did other old men that I might name—the Fabricii, the Curii, the Coruncanii—do nothing, when they defended the republic by their counsel and influence? Blindness came upon Appius Claudius[1] in his old age; yet he, when the sentiment of the Senate leaned toward the conclusion of peace and a treaty with Pyrrhus, did not hesitate to say to them what Ennius has fully expressed in verse,—
"Wont to stand firm, upon what devious way
Demented rush ye now?"
and more, most forcibly, to the same purpose. You know the poem, and the speech that Appius actually made is still extant. This took place seventeen years after his second consulship, ten years having
- ↑ Appius Claudius was undoubtedly the greatest statesman and the most useful citizen of his time. His name still lives and some vestiges of his public spirit remain in the Appia Via, Rome's first great military road, and the Aqua Appia, the earliest aqueduct by which water from the mountains was brought into the city. Livy tells a curious story of his blindness. The patrician gens of the Potitii were hereditary priests of Hercules, whom they worshipped by rites which were their family secret. Appius, probably apprehensive, as so many modern statesmen have been, of potential mischief from secret societies, hired these men to divulge the mysteries of their worship to certain public slaves or servants. The consequence was that the whole gens, including twelve families and thirty young men, perished in a single year, and some years afterward (post aliquot annos) by the persistent anger of the gods Appius was deprived of sight. Post, ergo propter.
