e wait for the orders of the senate when instant help is
required. For both Brutus and Cassius have in many instances been
a senate to themselves. For it is quite inevitable that in such a
confusion and disturbance of all things men should be guided by the
present emergency rather than by precedent. Nor will this be the first
time that either Brutus or Cassius has considered the safety and
deliverance of his country his most holy law and his most excellent
precedent. Therefore, if there were no motion submitted to us about
the pursuit of Dolabella, still I should consider it equivalent to a
decree, when there were men of such a character for virtue, authority,
and the greatest nobleness, possessing armies, one of which is already
known to us, and the other has been abundantly heard of.

XII Brutus then, you may be sure, has not waited for our decrees, as
he was sure of our desires. For he is not gone to his own province of
Crete, he has flown to Macedonia, which belonged to another, he has
accounted everything his own which you have wished to be yours, he has
enlisted new legions, he has received old ones, he has gained over to
his own standard the cavalry of Dolabella, and even before that man
was polluted with such enormous parricide, he, of his own head,
pronounced him his enemy. For if he were not one, by what right could
he himself have tempted the cavalry to abandon the consul? What more
need I say? Did not Caius Cassius, a man endowed with equal greatness
of mind and with equal wisdom, depart from Italy with the deliberate
object of preventing Dolabella from obtaining possession of Syria? By
what law? By what right? By that which Jupiter himself has sanctioned,
that everything which was advantageous to the republic should be
considered legal and just.

For law is nothing but a correct principle drawn from the inspiration
of the gods, commanding what is honest, and forbidding the contrary.
Cassius, therefore, obeyed this law when he went into Syria, a
province which belonged to another, if men were to abide by the
written laws, but which, when these were trampled under foot, was his
by the law of nature. But in order that they may be sanctioned by your
authority also, I now give my vote, that,

"As Publius Dolabella, and those who have been the ministers of and
accomplices and assistants in his cruel and infamous crime, have been
pronounced enemies of the Roman people by the senate, and as the
senate has voted