M. Tullius Cicero, On the Responses of the Haruspices
C. D. Yonge, Ed.

After that, when he saw you recovering your breath after your fear of bloodshed, when he saw your authority rising again above the waves of that slavery, and the recollection of, and regret for me, getting more vivid, then he began on a sudden to sell himself to you, though with the most treacherous design. Then he began to say, both here in this house and in the assemblies of the people, that the Sullan laws had been passed in opposition to the auspices; among which laws was that lex curiata on which the whole of his tribuneship depended, though he was too frantic to see that. He brought forward that most fearless man Marcus Bibulus. He asked him whether he had not always been observing the heavens when Caius Caesar was carrying those laws? He replied, that he always had been observing them at that time. He asked the augurs whether laws which had been passed under these circumstances had been duly passed? They said, such a proceeding was irregular. Some people, virtuous men, and men who had done great service to me, began to extol him; utterly ignorant I imagine, of the lengths to which his madness could carry him. He proceeded further. He began to inveigh against Cnaeus Pompeius, the originator, as he was accustomed to boast, of all his designs. He gained great popularity in the people's eyes. [49] But then, when he had become elated by the hope that he might be able—as he had by his abominable wickedness crushed, as he fancied him who, though in the garb of peace, had proved the suppressor of domestic war—to put down also that great man who had been the conqueror of our foreign wars and foreign enemies, then was seized in the temple of Castor that wicked dagger which was nearly the destroyer of this empire. Then he, against whom no enemy's city had ever long continued shut—he, who had always broken through all straits, trampled on all heights, crushed, by his energy and valour, the opposing weapons of every foe, was himself besieged at home; and, by the counsels which he adopted, relieved me from the reproaches cast on my timidity by some ignorant people. For if it was miserable rather than disgraceful to Cnaeus Pompeius, that bravest of all men who have ever been born, not to be able to go abroad in the sight of men, and to be secluded from all public places, as long as that fellow was tribune of the people, and to put up with his threats, when he said in the public assembly that he wished to build a second piazza in Carinae,¹ to correspond to the one on the Palatine Hill; certainly, for me to leave my house was grievous as far as my own private grief was concerned, but glorious if you look only at the interests of the republic.