are so favorably placed that the matter
is in your hands and the responsibility rests upon you; and from your
own selves you may obtain either concord and with it liberty, or
seditions and civil wars again and a master at the close of them.
Whatever you decide to-day all the rest will follow. This being the
state of the case as I see it, I declare that you ought to abandon your
mutual enmities or jealousies or whatever name should be applied to
them, and return to that ancient condition of peace and friendship and
harmony. For you should remember this, if nothing else, that so long as
we enjoyed that kind of government, we acquired lands, fortunes, glory
and allies, but ever since we were led into abusing one another, so far
from growing better we have become decidedly worse off. I am so firmly
convinced that nothing else at present could save the city that if we do
not to-day, at once, with all possible speed, adopt some policy, we
shall never be able to regain our position.

[-25-] "Notice carefully that I am speaking only the truth, of which you
may convince yourselves if you regard present conditions and then
consider our position in old times. Do you not see what is taking
place,--that the populace is again being divided and torn asunder and
that, some choosing this side, and some that, they have already fallen
into two parties and two camps, that the one side has taken timely
possession of the Capitol as if they feared the Gauls or somebody, and
the other side with headquarters in the Forum is preparing to besiege
them and so behaving like Carthaginians, and not as though they too were
Romans? Do you not hear that though formerly citizens often differed,
even to the extent of occupying the Aventine once, and the Capitol, and
some of them the Sacred Mount, as often as they were reconciled one with
another on equal terms (or by yielding but a small point) they at once
stopped hating one another, to live the rest of their lives in such
peace and harmony that in common they carried through successfully many
great wars? As often, on the other hand, as they had recourse to murders
and assassinations, the one side deceived by the justification of
defending themselves against the encroachments of the other, and the
other side by an ambition to appear to be inferior to none, no good ever
came of it. Why need I waste time by repeating to you, who know them
equally well, the names of Valerius, Horatius, Saturninus, Glaucia,