10.
[23]
Wherefore, O citizens, since a supplication has been decreed at all the altars, celebrate
those days with your wives and children; for many just and deserved honours have been often
paid to the immortal gods, but juster ones never. For you have been snatched from a most
cruel and miserable destruction, and you have been snatched from it without slaughter,
without bloodshed, without an army, without a battle. You have conquered in the garb of
peace, with me in the garb of peace for your only general and commander.
[24]
Remember, O citizens, all civil dissensions, and not
only those which you have heard of but these also which you yourselves remember and have
seen. Lucius Sulla crushed Publius Sulpicius1; he drove from the city Caius
Marius the guardian of this city; and of many other brave men some he drove from the city,
and some he murdered. Cnaeus Octavius the consul drove his colleague by force of arms out of
the city; all this place was crowded with heaps of carcasses and flowed with the blood of
citizens; afterwards Cinna and Marius got the upper hand; and then most illustrious men were
put to death, and the spirits of the state were extinguished. Afterwards Sulla avenged the
cruelty of this victory; it is needless to say with what a diminution of the citizens and
with what disasters to the republic Marcus Lepidus disagreed with that most eminent and brave
man Quintus, Catulus. His death did not cause as much grief to the republic as that of the
others.
[25]
And these dissensions, O Romans, were such as concerned
not the destruction of the republic, but only a change in the constitution. They did not wish
that there should be no republic, but that they themselves should be the chief men in that
which existed; nor did they desire that the city should be burnt, but that they themselves
should flourish in it. And yet all those dissensions, none of which aimed at the destruction
of the republic, were such that they were to be terminated not by a reconciliation and
concord, but only by internecine war among the citizens. But in this war alone, the greatest
and most cruel in the memory of man,—a war such as even the countries of the
barbarians have never waged with their own tribes,—a war in which this law was laid
down by Lentulus, and Catiline, and Cassius and Cethegus that every one, who could live in
safety as long as the city remained in safety, should be considered as an enemy, in this war
I have so managed matters, O Romans that you should all be preserved in safety; and though
your enemies had thought that only such a number of the citizens would be left as had held
out against an interminable massacre and only so much of the city as the flames could not
devour, I have preserved both the city and the citizens unhurt and undiminished.
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1 Sulpicius procured a law to be passed for taking the command against Mithridates from Sulla and giving it to Marius; Sulla came to Rome with his army and slew Sulpicius, when Marius fled to Africa. Sulla made Octavius and Cinna consuls, who quarreled after he was gone, and Cinna went over to the party of Marius, who returned to Rome. Lepidus and Catulus were consuls the year after the death of Sulla, and they quarreled because Lepidus wished to rescind all the acts of Sulla. Lepidus was defeated, fled to Sardinia, and died there.
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