Kitap 4
appendix.
Just before the arrival of the triumvirs Marcus Cicero left the city, considering it certain that he had no more chance of being saved from the vengeance of Antony than Brutus and Cassius had of escaping that of Octavius, — which was the fact. He fled first to his Tusculan villa and thence proceeded by cross-roads to that of Formiae in order to take ship at Caieta. There, after advancing several times seaward, he was driven back by adverse winds, and again he found himself unable to endure the tossing of the ship on the gloomy rolling waves, and he began at length to grow weary both of flight and of life. So he returned to his upper villa, which was a little more than a mile from the shore, saying, I will die in my fatherland that I have so often saved. It is well established that his slaves were ready to fight for him bravely and faithfully, but that he ordered them to put down the litter and endure with patience whatever an adverse fate should compel. As he leaned out of the litter and offered his neck unmoved, his head was cut off. Nor did this satisfy the senseless cruelty of the soldiers. They cut off his hands, also, for the offence of having written something against Antony. Thus the head was brought to Antony and placed by his order between the two hands on the rostra, where, often as consul, often as a consular, and, that very year against Antony, he had been heard with admiration of his eloquence, the like of which no other human voice ever uttered. The people, raising their eyes bedimmed with tears, could scarcely bear the sight of his dismembered parts. He lived sixty-three years, so that in the absence of violence his death could not have been considered premature. His genius served him well both in his works and in the rewards thereof. He enjoyed the favors of fortune for a long time, yet in the intervals of his protracted career of prosperity he suffered some severe blows, exile, the ruin of the party he had espoused, the death of his daughter, and his end so sad and bitter, none of which calamities did he bear as became a man except his death, which to one who weighs the matter impartially must seem the less undeserved, since he suffered nothing more cruel at the hands of his victorious enemy than he would himself have inflicted if fortune had put the same power in his hands.Both in letters and in public speeches Cicero declared that if he had had a part in the assassination of Caesar he would have put Antony to death also. Thus in the letter to Cassius (Ad Fan. xii. 3) he says: The fury of your friend [Antony] increases from day to day. For a first example, there is the statue which he has placed in the forum inscribed To the most worthy Father of his Country, whereby you are stigmatized not only as assassins, but even as parricides. You stigmatized, do I say? Rather myself, for this madman says that I was the leader in your most noble deed. Would that I had been! In that case he would not be troubling us now. In the second Philippic (7) he says that if Rome had the same kind of a leader now that she had in the time of the conspiracy of Catiline, Antony would share the fate of those conspirators. When Cicero wrote the second Philippic he knew that he took his life in his hand. Addressing, himself to Antony, he said: I defended the republic when I was young, I will not abandon it now that I am old. I despised the sword of Catiline, I will not quail before yours. I will offer my body freely if my death can bring back liberty to the state. . . . Death is even desirable to me, Conscript Fathers, after the honors I have gained and the deeds I have done. I ask for only these two things: first, that dying, I may leave the Roman people free; the immortal gods can grant me nothing that I desire more. The other is that the rewards of each man may be in proportion to what he has deserved of the republic. (Phil. ii. 46.) Yet if we weigh his virtues and his faults he must be pronounced a great, energetic, and ever memorable man, to fitly sound whose praises another Cicero would be needed. (Livy, cxx.) This judgment of the gravest of Roman historians is the one which the better part of mankind have ratified in all succeeding ages.
