| Cicero, Epistula ad Octavianum (English) (XML Header) [genre: prose] [word count] [lemma count] [Cic. Oct.]. | ||
| <<Cic. Oct. 2 | Cic. Oct. 9 (Latin) | >>Cic. Oct. 9 |
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?
9 The two Decii will hear that those citizens are slaves, to secure whose supremacy over their enemies they devoted themselves for victory. Gaius Marius, who refused to have even a common soldier who was unchaste, [Note] will hear that we are the slaves of an immoral despot. Brutus will hear that the people, whom he first and afterwards his descendants liberated from tyrants, has been consigned to slavery as the price of shame. These reports, if by no one else, will be quickly carried down to them by myself. For as I shall be unable to escape your tyrannies while living, I have determined to fly from life and from them at the same time.
| Cicero, Epistula ad Octavianum (English) (XML Header) [genre: prose] [word count] [lemma count] [Cic. Oct.]. | ||
| <<Cic. Oct. 2 | Cic. Oct. 9 (Latin) | >>Cic. Oct. 9 |
