[23]
Answer me at the same time, you who call us
tyrants who are agreed together as to our views for the general safety, were
not you a tribune of the people, but in reality an intolerable tyrant raised
of some obscure mud and darkness? and did not you attempt in the first
instance to overturn the republic, which was originally founded in obedience
to auspices, by the destruction of those same
auspices arm after that have not you been
the only man to trample under foot and disregard those most holy laws, I
mean the Aelian and Fufian laws,—which subsisted through the
furious times of the Gracchi, and through all the audacity of
Saturninus,—which survived unhurt the rabble of
Drusus,1 and the contests of Sulpicius,2 and the massacres of Cinna, and even the battles and
bloodshed of Sulla? Did you not threaten the consul with death, and blockade
him when he had shut himself up in his house, and attempt even to drag him
out of his house? And you, who by means of that magistracy emerged out of
actual beggary, and who now even alarm us by your riches, were you not so
inhuman as to endeavour, by means of your proposed law, to get rid of and
destroy the chosen men and chief leaders of the state?
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1 Cicero refers here to the Marcus Livius Drusus who, A. U. C. 661, brought forward an entire series of measures, calculated, as he said, to remedy the evils of the state; among others, one to give the freedom of the city to all the inhabitants of Italy. He was privately assassinated.
2 Publius Sulpicius Rufus was a partisan of Marius; and, as tribune of the people, the instigator of some violent measures against Sulla. After Sulla had driven Marius out of the city, Sulpicius was slain and put to death.
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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