which is not safe, and regards every means of retaining his supremacy as honourable. Hence that state of repose and tranquillity combined with freedom, which many good men prized more highly than honours attended with toil, is a thing of the past; in these times one must either be slave or master, one must feel fear, citizens, or inspire it. For what else is left us? What human laws survive? What divine laws have not been violated? The Roman people, lately ruler of the nations, now stripped of power, repute and rights, without the means to live[1] and an object of contempt, does not even retain the rations of slaves. A great part of our allies and of the people of Latium to whom you gave citizenship in return for many distinguished services are robbed of it by one man, while a few of his minions, as a recompense for their crimes, have seized upon the ancestral homes of the guiltless commons. The laws, the courts,[2] the treasury, the provinces, the kings, in fact, the power of life and death over our citizens are in the hands of one man. You have even beheld human sacrifices[3] and tombs stained with the blood of citizens. If you are men, is anything left to you except to put an end to oppression or to die valiantly? For of a truth Nature has appointed one and the same end for all, even for those encased in steel, and no one awaits the last necessity, daring nothing, unless he has the heart of a woman.
But Sulla says that I am a sower of sedition, because I protest against the rewards paid to civil commotion; a lover of war, because I would reclaim
