Latin Texts & Translations

5 Oh, how unwise I have always been, and what an ill-grounded reputation has mine turned out to be! How greatly, oh people of Rome, have you been deceived in me! What an old age of disaster and ruin! Oh, what a disgrace to my grey hairs, when life is all but gone and dotage has set in! I—I have led the senate to its bloody doom! I have deceived the Republic! I have forced the senate to lay violent hands upon itself, when I said that Iuno smiled on your birth, and that your mother had brought forth a golden age ! ^[Note] In reality the fates were foretelling you to be the Paris of your country, destined to devastate the city with fire, Italy with war; to pitch your camp in the temples of the immortal gods; and to hold the senate in a camp.

6 What a miserable upsetting of the constitution—how sudden and rapid and complicated! Who is likely to arise with a genius capable of narrating these events so as to make them seem fact and not fiction? Who will there ever be of such quick intelligence as not to think that events which have been recorded with the most absolute truthfulness only resemble the incidents of a drama? For think of Antony declared a public enemy; of a consul-designate, and he too a father of the state, besieged by him; of you setting out to relieve the consul and crush the enemy; of the enemy being put to flight by you and the consul released from the siege; and then shortly afterwards of this same routed enemy invited back as your coheir to receive, after the death of the Republic, the property of the Roman people; and of the consul-designate again surrounded where he had no walls to defend himself, but only streams and mountains. Who will attempt to give a picture of these events? Who will be bold enough to believe them? Let me be once pardoned for having made a mistake; let confession atone for an error.

7 For I will speak frankly. Would to heaven, Antony, we had not driven you away as our despot, rather than have received this one! Not that any servitude is a thing to be wished, but because the condition of a slave is rendered less degrading by the rank of his master; while of two evils the greater is to be shunned, the less is to be chosen. He after all used to ask for what he desired to carry oft; you wrench it from our hands. He sought to obtain a province when he was consul, you set your heart on one when a private Citizen. He established courts and carried laws to protect the bad, you to destroy the best. He protected the Capitol from bloodshed and the incendiary fire of slaves, you wish to wipe out everything in blood and flame. If the man who granted provinces to Cassius and the Bruti, and those other guardians of the Roman name, acted as despot, what will he do who deprives them of life? If the man who ejected them from the City was a tyrant, what are we to call the man, who does not leave them even a place of exile?

8 Therefore, if the buried ashes of our ancestors have any Consciousness, if all sensation is not destroyed along with the body in one and the same fire, what will one of our people say who has most recently departed to that eternal home, when questioned as to the present fortunes of the Roman people? What kind of news will the famous men of old—the Africani, the Maximi, the Paulli, and the Scipiones—receive about their posterity? What will they hear about their country, which they adorned with spoils and triumphs? Will it be that there was a youth eighteen years old, whose grandfather was a money-changer, ^[Note] his father a touting witness, ^[Note] both in truth making a precarious livelihood, but one of them up to old age so that he could not deny it, the other from boyhood so that he could not but confess it: and that this youth was plundering the Republic? And that, too, though he had no provinces subdued and added to the empire, and no ancestral position to give him a claim to that overweening power? Though his good looks had gained him money by his shame and a noble name stained by unchastity? Though he had forced old gladiators of Iulius, reduced by wounds and age—the starveling remainders of Caesar's training school—to accept the wand of dismissal, ^[Note] surrounded by whom he wrought general havoc, spared no one, lived for his own enjoyment, and held the Republic as his private possession, as though in marriage with a rich wife he had received it as a legacy?