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THE SIXTH ORATION OF M. T. CICERO AGAINST MARCUS ANTONIUS. CALLED ALSO THE SIXTH PHILIPPIC. ADDRESSED TO THE PEOPLE.
[17]
For an extraordinary commission is a measure suited rather
to the fickle character of the mob; one which does not at all become our dignity
or this assembly. In the war against Antiochus, a great and important war, when
Asia had fallen by lot to Lucius
Scipio as his province, and when he was thought to have hardly spirit and hardly
vigor enough for it; and when the senate was inclined to entrust the business to
his colleague Caius Laelius, the father of this Laelius, who was surnamed the
Wise; Publius Africanus, the elder brother of Lucius Scipio, rose up, and
entreated them not to cast such a slur on his family, and said that in his
brother there was united the greatest possible valor, with the most consummate
prudence; and that he too, notwithstanding his age, and all the exploits which
he had performed, would attend his brother as his lieutenant. And after he had
said this, nothing was changed in respect to Scipio's province; nor was any
extraordinary command sought for any more in that war than in those two terrible
Punic wars which had preceded it, which were carried on and conducted to their
termination either by the consuls or by dictators; or than in the war with
Pyrrhus, or in that with Philippus, or afterward in the Achaean war, or in the
third Punic war; for which last the Roman people took great care to select a
suitable general, Publius Scipio, but at the same time it appointed him to the
consulship in order to conduct it.
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