Kitap 4
appendix.
The glowing words of Velleius also deserve a place here; and these likewise have found their echo in all later generations, viz.: You have gained nothing, Mark Antony (for the indignation bursting from my mind and breast compels me to exceed the intended character of this work); you have gained nothing, I say, by paying the price for closing that celestial voice and cutting off that most noble head, and instigating, by a cruel reward, the death of a man who had once been so great a consul and the saviour of the republic. You deprived Marcus Cicero of a life of anxiety and a feeble old age, of an existence worse under your chieftainship than death under your triumvirate. But the fame and glory of his deeds and words you have not taken from him in the least, but rather augumented. He lives and will live in the memory of all ages. So long as this body of the natural universe, whether created by chance or by providence, or however constituted, which he almost alone of the Romans penetrated with his intellect, embraced with his genius, and illuminated with his eloquence, shall endure, it will bear the praise of Cicero as coeval with it. All posterity will admire what he wrote against you and execrate what you did against him, and sooner shall the human race perish from the earth than his fame decay. (Velleius, ii. 66.)
