The context is hard to explain, because I don’t know enough about the political situation, and the social conventions that provide the background of “pro Sestio.” As best I can tell, Cicero’s enemies have tried to deny the senate the right to express sympathy for Cicero, which sympathy would have taken the form of symbolic mourning. Cicero presents this denial as a outrage. I sense angry sarcasm in the passage.
ergo hominis desperati et proditoris rei publicae casum lugebunt fortasse qui volent: civis florentissimi benivolentia bonorum et optime de salute patriae meriti periculum, coniunctum cum periculo civitatis, lugere senatui non licebit?
Translation: and so whoever wishes will mourn–perhaps–the fall of worthless men, of betrayers of the public good: will it not be permitted to the senate to mourn the threat [periculum] to a citizen most deserving [florentissimi . . . meriti ] the goodwill of the best men, and useful to the safety of the fatherland, [when the threat to him is] joined with peril to the state?
It is the part after the colon that vexes me. Here are my grammar calls.
civis florentissimi: genitive modifier of periculum, tells who is in danger
benevolentia: ablative complement of the adjective florentissimi, ablative of respect?
optime de salute patriae: I’m baffled by this phrase. My translation, “useful to the safety of the fatherland” is a wild guess. I want to read this as another ablative complement of florentissimi, in parallel with benevolentia, but I don’t know how to define the words.
Benevolentia accompanies florentissimi, it is some kind of variation of the ablative of means, such as the ablative of cause: ‘most flourishing by, through, because of the benevolence of good men’ or something like that. Check the dictionary for the phrase ‘bene (optime) mereri de aliquo,’ it should be in the secondary meanings. It means to have served someone (or something, in this instance) well and be deserving of thanks.
Many thanks to Nesrad and Barry Hofstetter for the gloss on bene/optime in relation to meriti. I actually had scanned L&S for
light on optime, but I missed the relevance of the secondary usage,
though now it seems obvious. Reading through the long entries on the computer screen makes it look like a good idea to lay out the cash for a paper copy.
Thanks also to Barry for detecting the singular/plural error in my
translation of hominis desperati…
optime de salute patriae meriti: here, as I now understand, optime is an adverb modifying meriti.meriti in turn is an adjective, or participle, modifying civis. As I now see it, the actual parallelism is between florentissimi and meriti, and not as I speculated in my OP.
For ease of reference, I repeat the quotation in the original query.
ergo hominis desperati et proditoris rei publicae casum lugebunt
fortasse qui volent: civis florentissimi benivolentia bonorum et
optime de salute patriae meriti periculum, coniunctum cum periculo
civitatis, lugere senatui non licebit?
I’m not sure about the political situation, either, but I suspect hominis desperati et proditoris rei publicae refers to Catiline. Cicero incurred considerable ill-will by having Catiline’s co-conspirators summarily put to death, and this eventually led to Cicero’s exile.
casum – might be translated “fate”.
This turns on the rhetorical contrast between hominis desperati et proditoris rei publicae and civis florentissimi. Not sure this adds much to what everyone else has written, but to paraphrase a bit:
Catiline (if I’m right) is a dead desperado, while Cicero is a “flourishing” citizen, flourishing by reason of the good will of right-thinking men [bonorum]; Catiline is a traitor to the republic, while Cicero is a citizen who is deserving of the highest [optimi] honor for [his actions that secured] the salvation of the fatherland. Yet those who want to [sarcastic: those evil men – contrasting with bonorum] who are in sympathy with Catiline the traitor – will – perhaps [your translation captures the sarcasm in fortasse] – mourn Catiline’s fate, while the Senate – the Senate! – will not be allowed to mourn the [mere] danger (as opposed to death) to Cicero – [a personal danger, to be sure, but] a danger that is intimately connected to the danger to the state?
Yes, this is outraged sarcasm, amplified by Cicero’s rhetoric.
For Golden Age authors, all you need is Lewis’s Elementary Latin Dictionary. You can get one second hand from ABE for about $20. For casual reading, it’s better than the OLD or L&S because it’s more concise.
Thanks to Hylander for his interpretations of the pro Sestio, and to Nesrad for his helpful advice on the Lewis Elementary Latin Dictionary. I have ordered a paper copy.
These helpful replies are an encouragement to keep trying.