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| Marcus Tullius Cicero Post reditum in senatu IntraText CT - Text |
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| II. 3 Therefore, O conscript fathers, we seem by your agency to have obtained
a species of immortality, a thing too great to be even wished for by men. For
what time will there ever be in which the memory and fame of your kindnesses to
me will perish? The memory of your kindness, who, at the very time that you
were besieged by violence and arms and terror and threats, not long after my
departure all agreed in recalling me, at the motion of Lucius Ninnius, a most
fearless and virtuous man, the most faithful and (if it had come to a battle)
the least timid defender of my safety that that fatal year could produce. After
the honour of making a formal decree to that effect was refused to you by the
means of that tribune of the people, who as he was unable of himself to injure
the republic, destroyed it as far as he could by the wickedness of another, you
never kept silence concerning me, you never ceased to demand my safety from
those consuls who had sold it. 4 Therefore, at last it was owing to
your authority and your zeal that that very year which I had preferred to have
fatal to myself rather than to my country, elected these men as tribunes, who
proposed a law concerning my safety, and constantly brought it under your
notice. For the consuls being modest men, and having a regard for the laws,
were hindered by a law, not by the one which had been passed concerning me, but
by one respecting themselves, when my enemy had carried a clause, that when
those men had come to life again who nearly destroyed the state, then I might
return to the city. By which action he confessed two things—both that he longed
for them to be living, and also that the republic would be in great peril, if
either the enemies and murderers of the republic came to life again, or if I did
not return. Therefore, in that very year when I had departed, and when the chief man of the state was forced to defend his own life, not by the protection of the laws, but by that of his own walls,—when the republic was without consuls, and bereft, like an orphan, not only of its regular parents, but even of its annual guardians,—when you were forbidden to deliver your opinions,—when the chief clause of my proscription was repeatedly read,—still you never hesitated to consider my safety as united with the general welfare. |
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