M. Tullius Cicero, For Sestius
C. D. Yonge, Ed.

For the foreign wars waged against us by foreign kings, countries, and nations, have long been so completely put down, that they are treating them, to our own great credit, as people whom we can allow to remain at peace. Moreover it has not been a common thing for unpopularity to attach itself to any one of the citizens on account of any warlike triumphs. We often have to resist domestic evils and the counsels of audacious citizens; and it is indispensable to retain in the republic a remedy for these dangers; all which, O judges, you would have lost if the power of declaring its grief at my position had been taken from the senate and people of Rome by my death. Wherefore, I warn you, O young men, and I enjoin you by the right which belongs to me to do so, you who have a regard for propriety, for the republic, and for glory, not to be slow, if at any time any necessity summons you to defend the republic against worthless citizens, and not, from any recollection of what has happened to me, to shun bold counsels. [52] In the first place, there is no danger of any one ever falling in with such consuls as these, especially if these are requited as they deserve. In the second place, there never will again, I hope, be an instance of any wicked man saying that he is attacking the republic with the approval and assistance of virtuous citizens, while they keep silence; nor of such a man's threatening citizens in the garb of peace with the terrors of an armed soldiery; nor will there be any excuse for a general stationed with his army at the gates, allowing the terror of his name to be used as an instrument for opposing and alarming the citizens. For the senate will never be so oppressed as to have no power of even entreating or lamenting; the equestrian order will never be bound hand and foot so completely as to allow Roman knights to be banished by the consul. But yet even after all these things had happened, and many other more important events also, which I pass over designedly, still you see that, after a short interval of suffering, I was recalled to the enjoyment of my former dignity by the voice of the republic.