[47]
No doubt the wicked would have been defeated. Still they would have been
citizens and they would have been defeated by that man as a private
individual, who as consul, without any appeal to arms, had preserved the
republic. But suppose the good men had been defeated, what would have
remained? Do not you see that the state would have fallen into the hands of
the slaves? Was even I myself as some people think to encounter death with
entire equanimity? What? Was I at that time seeking to avoid death? or was
there anything which I could think more desirable for myself, or at the very
time that I was accomplishing these great exploits amid that multitude of
wicked men, were not death and exile constantly present to my eyes? Were not
these very events, even at the moment of my performance of those exploits,
prophesied as it were by me as parts of my destiny? Or was life worth
preserving at a time when all my family and friends were in such grief when
there was such confusion such misery such destruction of everything which
either nature or fortune had given me? Was I so stupid? so ignorant of
affairs? so destitute of all sense and all ability? Had I heard nothing? Had
I seen nothing? Had I learnt nothing myself by reading or by inquiry? Was I
ignorant that the duration of life is brief, that of glory everlasting?
that, as death was appointed for all men, it was desirable that life, which
must some day or other be given up to necessity, should appear to have been
made a present of to one's country rather than reserved for the claim of
nature? Was I ignorant that there had been this dispute between the wisest
men? that some said that the souls and senses of men were extinguished by
death; but that others thought that the minds of wise and brave men were
then in the greatest degree sensible and vigorous when they had departed
from the body? And one of these alternatives would seem to show, that to be
deprived of feeling was not a thing to be avoided; the other alternative
must evidently be very desirable, to become possessed of a more perfect
sensation.
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M. Tullius Cicero. The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, literally translated by C. D. Yonge, B. A. London. George Bell & Sons, York Street, Covent Garden. 1891.
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