This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
Table of Contents:
THE SIXTH ORATION OF M. T. CICERO AGAINST MARCUS ANTONIUS. CALLED ALSO THE SIXTH PHILIPPIC. ADDRESSED TO THE PEOPLE.
[39]
For (O ye immortal gods!) what could happen more to be
admired by foreign nations, or more to be desired by the Roman people than, at a
time when there was a most important civil war, the result of which we were all
dreading, that it should be extinguished by prudence rather than that arms and
violence should be able to put every thing to the hazard of a battle? And if
Caesar had been guided by the same principles in that odious and miserable war,
we should have—to say nothing of their father—the two sons
of Cnaeus Pompeius, that most illustrious and virtuous man, safe among us; men
whose piety and filial affection certainly ought not to have been their ruin.
Would that Marcus. Lepidus had been able to save them all! He showed that he
would have done so, by his conduct in cases where he had the power; when he
restored Sextus Pompeius to the state, a great ornament to the republic, and a
most illustrious monument of his clemency. Sad was that picture, melancholy was
the destiny then of the Roman people. For after Pompeius the father was dead, he
who was the light of the Roman people, the son too, who was wholly like his
father, was also slain.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.