APPENDIX
CICERO TO OCTAVIAN1
IF your legions, which are most bitterly hostile
to my name and to that of the Roman people, had
left it possible for me to come into the senate
and hold debate in the presence of the Republic, I
would have done so, and not so much with pleasure
as from necessity. For no remedies applied to
wounds are so painful as those that are healing.
But since, being hemmed round with armed cohorts,
the senate cannot decree anything expressing its
real sentiments except that it is in terror, since
in the Capitol there are military standards, since
in the city soldiers roam at will, since in the
Campus Martius a camp is pitched, since the whole
of Italy is distracted by legions enrolled to
secure our freedom, but brought here to enslave
us, and by the cavalry of foreign
tribes—I will for the present yield you
possession of the forum, the senate-house, and the
most sacred temples of the immortal gods, in
which, as liberty first revives and then is
trampled out, the senate is consulted about
nothing, has countless fears, and only passes
decrees to flatter. Presently, when the state of
things seems to demand it, I shall quit the city,
which, once preserved as it was by me that it
might be free, I shall never endure to see
enslaved. I shall quit a life which, although
filled with anxiety, yet, if destined to profit
the Republic, consoles me with a good hope of
future fame. If that hope is taken from me, I
shall fall without a moment's hesitation, and
shall depart, though taking care to make it clear
that in my judgment fortune and not courage has
deserted me. But there is one thing I will not
omit as a proof of my recent wrong, as a record of
past outrage, and a declaration of the feeling of
those that are away: since I am prevented from
remonstrating with you face to face, I will do so
in your absence in the defence of the Republic and
in my own. And I say "in my own
defence," since my safety is either useful to the
Republic or at least closely bound up with the
public safety. For in the name of the immortal
gods—unless by chance it is vain for me
to appeal to those, whose ears and hearts are
turned from us—and in the name of the
fortune of the Roman people, which though hostile
to us was once propitious, and, as I hope, will be
so again—who is there so lost to all
feelings of manhood, who is there so bitterly
hostile to the name and dwelling-places of this
city, as to be able to ignore what is happening,
or not to grieve at it, or, if he can by no means
remedy the public disasters, not to avoid his own
danger by death?
For, to
begin at the beginning and to trace events to the
end, and to compare the last with the first, what
morrow has dawned on the Roman people that was not
more disastrous than the day before, and what hour
that was not more calamitous than that which it
succeeded? Marcus Antonius, a man of great
courage—I only wish he had been wiser
!—when Gaius Caesar had by an act of the
greatest resolution, though with no happy results,
been removed from his despotic rule over the
Republic, had conceived the ambition for a more
regal primacy than a free state could tolerate. He
was throwing away the public money, exhausting the
treasury, reducing the revenues, presenting cities
and whole tribes with immunity in virtue of
Caesar's memoranda. He was playing the part of
dictator, imposing his laws upon us: and while
forbidding a dictator to be named, he himself
assumed the authority of a king while he was still
consul, and had set his heart on controlling all
the provinces by himself. What had we to expect or
look for from a man who thought the province of
Macedonia, which Caesar when victorious had taken
as his own,
2 as too mean for him? You stood forward
then as the champion of our liberty, the best that
was possible at the time—and oh! that
neither our opinion of you nor your own good faith
had been forfeited !—and having hired
veterans to form a body of soldiers, and having
induced two legions
3 to abandon the
destruction of their country for its preservation,
when the Republic was now in all but a desperate
and utterly prostrate position, you suddenly
raised it by your own resources What honours,
before you demanded them, on a greater scale than
you desired, more numerous than you hoped, did not
the senate bestow upon you? It gave you the fasces
that it might have a defender with full authority,
not that he might by this imperium take arms
against itself. It gave you the title of
imperator, when the army of the enemy had been
repulsed, by way of paying you a
compliment, not that that fugitive army, shattered
by the slaughter which it had itself incurred,
4 might
hail you imperator. It decreed you a statue in the
forum, a 'place in the senate, the highest office
before the legal age. If there is anything else
that can be given, it will add it. What is there
greater than this that you desire to take? But if
on the other hand you have had every kind of
honour bestowed on you before the legal age,
beyond the ordinary usage, beyond even the reach
of human nature, why do you curtail the authority
of the senate as though it were ungrateful, or
forgetful of your good services? Is it wanton
cruelty or deliberate crime on your part? Whither
have we sent you? From whom are you returning?
Against whom have we armed you? On whom arc you
meditating war? From whom are you withdrawing an
army? Against whom are you drawing out your line
of battle? Why is the public enemy left untouched,
and the citizen attacked as an enemy? Why in the
very midst of your march is your camp pushed
farther from the adversary and nearer the city?
Their hope is perforce our terror. Oh, how unwise
I have always been, and what an ill-grounded
reputation has mine turned out to be! How greatly,
oh people of Rome, have you been deceived in me!
What an old age of disaster and ruin! Oh, what a
disgrace to my grey hairs, when life is all but
gone and dotage has set in! I—I have led
the senate to its bloody doom! I have deceived the
Republic! I have forced the senate to lay violent
hands upon itself, when I said that Iuno smiled on
your birth, and that your mother had brought forth
a golden age !
5 In reality the
fates were foretelling you to be the Paris of your
country, destined to devastate the city with fire,
Italy with war; to pitch your camp in the temples
of the immortal gods; and to hold the senate in a
camp. What a miserable upsetting of the
constitution—how sudden and rapid and
complicated! Who is likely to arise with a genius
capable of narrating these events so as to make
them seem fact and not fiction? Who will there
ever be of such quick intelligence as not to think
that events which have been recorded with the most
absolute truthfulness only resemble the incidents
of a drama? For think of Antony declared a public
enemy; of a consul-designate, and he too a father
of the state, besieged by him; of you setting out
to relieve the consul and crush the enemy; of the
enemy being put to flight by you and the consul
released from the siege; and then
shortly afterwards of this same routed enemy
invited back as your coheir to receive, after the
death of the Republic, the property of the Roman
people; and of the consul-designate again
surrounded where he had no walls to defend
himself, but only streams and mountains. Who will
attempt to give a picture of these events? Who
will be bold enough to believe them? Let me be
once pardoned for having made a mistake; let
confession atone for an error. For I will speak
frankly. Would to heaven, Antony, we had not
driven you away as our despot, rather than have
received this one! Not that any servitude is a
thing to be wished, but because the condition of a
slave is rendered less degrading by the rank of
his master; while of two evils the greater is to
be shunned, the less is to be chosen. He after all
used to ask for what he desired to carry oft; you
wrench it from our hands. He sought to obtain a
province when he was consul, you set your heart on
one when a private Citizen. He established courts
and carried laws to protect the bad, you to
destroy the best. He protected the Capitol from
bloodshed and the incendiary fire of slaves, you
wish to wipe out everything in blood and flame. If
the man who granted provinces to Cassius and the
Bruti, and those other guardians of the Roman
name, acted as despot, what will he do who
deprives them of life? If the man who ejected them
from the City was a tyrant, what are we to call
the man, who does not leave them even a place of
exile? Therefore, if the buried ashes of our
ancestors have any Consciousness, if all sensation
is not destroyed along with the body in one and
the same fire, what will one of our people say who
has most recently departed to that eternal home,
when questioned as to the present fortunes of the
Roman people? What kind of news will the famous
men of old—the Africani, the Maximi, the
Paulli, and the Scipiones—receive about
their posterity? What will they hear about their
country, which they adorned with spoils and
triumphs? Will it be that there was a youth
eighteen years old, whose grandfather was a
money-changer,
6 his father a touting witness,
7 both in truth making a precarious
livelihood, but one of them up to old age so that
he could not deny it, the other from boyhood so
that he could not but confess it: and that this
youth was plundering the Republic? And that, too,
though he had no provinces subdued and added to
the empire, and no ancestral position to give him
a claim to that overweening power? Though his good
looks had gained him money by his shame and a
noble name stained by unchastity? Though he had
forced old gladiators of Iulius,
reduced by wounds and age—the starveling
remainders of Caesar's training
school—to accept the wand of dismissal,
8 surrounded by whom he wrought general
havoc, spared no one, lived for his own enjoyment,
and held the Republic as his private possession,
as though in marriage with a rich wife he had
received it as a legacy? The two Decii will hear
that those citizens are slaves, to secure whose
supremacy over their enemies they devoted
themselves for victory. Gaius Marius, who refused
to have even a common soldier who was unchaste,
9 will hear that we are the slaves of an
immoral despot. Brutus will hear that the people,
whom he first and afterwards his descendants
liberated from tyrants, has been consigned to
slavery as the price of shame. These reports, if
by no one else, will be quickly carried down to
them by myself. For as I shall be unable to escape
your tyrannies while living, I have determined to
fly from life and from them at the same time.