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1.
From the first beginning, O conscript fathers, of this war which we have
undertaken against those impious and wicked citizens, I have been afraid lest
the insidious proposals of peace might damp our zeal for the recovery of our
liberty. For the name of peace is sweet; and the thing itself not only pleasant
but salutary. For a man seems to have no affection either for the private
hearths of the citizens, nor for the public laws, nor for the rights of freedom,
who is delighted with discord and the slaughter of his fellow-citizens, and with
civil war; and such a man I think ought to be erased from the catalogue of men,
and exterminated from all human society. Therefore, if Sulla, or Marius, or both
of them, or Octavius, or Cinna, or Sulla for the second time, or the other
Marius and Carbo, or if any one else has ever wished for civil war, I think that
man a citizen born for the detestation of the republic.
[2]
For why should I speak of the last man who stirred up such
a war; a man whose acts, indeed, we defend, while we admit that the author of
them was deservedly slain? Nothing, then, is more infamous than such a citizen
or such a man; if indeed he deserves to he considered either a citizen or a man,
who is desirous of civil war.
But the first thing that we have to consider, O conscript fathers, is whether
peace can exist with all men, or whether there be any war incapable of
reconciliation, in which any agreement of peace is only a covenant of slavery.
Whether Sulla was making peace with Scipio, or whether he was only pretending to
do so, there was no reason to despair, if an agreement had been come to, that
the city might have been in a tolerable state. If Cinna had been willing to
agree with Octavius, the safety of the citizens might still have had an
existence in the republic. In the last war, if Pompeius had relaxed somewhat of
his dignified firmness, and Caesar a good deal of his ambition, we might have
had both a lasting peace, and some considerable remainder of the republic.
M. Tullius Cicero. The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, literally translated by C. D. Yonge. London. George Bell & Sons. 1903.
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