But if deserved honours have been paid to any ambassador after death, there is no one by whom they can be found to have been ever more fully deserved than by Servius Sulpicius.  The rest of those men who have died while engaged on an embassy, have gone forth, subject indeed to the usual uncertainties of life, but without any especial danger or fear of death.  Servius Sulpicius set out with some hope indeed of reaching Antonius, but with none of returning.  But though he was so very ill that if any exertion were added to his bad state of health, he would have no hope of himself, still he did not refuse to try, even while at his last gasp, to be of some service to the republic.  Therefore neither the severity of the winter, nor the snow, nor the length of the journey, nor the badness of the roads, nor his daily increasing illness, delayed him.  And when he had arrived where he might meet and confer with the man to whom he had been sent, he departed this life in the midst of his care and consideration as to how he might best discharge the duty which he had undertaken.

As therefore, O Caius Pansa, you have done well in other respects, so you have acted admirably in exhorting us this day to pay honour to Servius Sulpicius, and in yourself making an eloquent oration in his praise.  And after the speech which we have heard from you, I should have been content to say nothing beyond barely giving my vote, if I did not think it necessary to reply to Publius Servilius, who has declared his opinion that this honour of a statue ought to be granted to no one who has not been actually slain with a sword while performing the duties of his embassy.  But I, O conscript fathers, consider that this was the feeling of our ancestors, that they considered that it was the cause of death, and not the manner of it, which was a proper subject for inquiry.  In fact, they thought fit that a monument should be erected to any man whose death was caused by an embassy, in order to tempt men in perilous wars to be the more bold in undertaking the office of an ambassador.  What we ought to do, therefore, is, not to scrutinise the precedents afforded by our ancestors, but to explain their intentions from which the precedents themselves arose.

II.  Lar Tolumnius, the king of Veii, slew four ambassadors of the Roman people, at Fidenae, whose statues were standing in the rostra till within my recollection.  The honour was well deserved.  For our ancestors gave those men who had encountered death in the cause of the republic an imperishable memory in exchange for this transitory life.  We see in the rostra the statue of Cnaeus Octavius, an illustrious and great man, the first man who brought the consulship into that family, which afterwards abounded in illustrious men.  There was no one then who envied him, because he was a new man; there was no one who did not honour his virtue.  But yet the embassy of Octavius was one in which there was no suspicion of danger.  For having been sent