Book 2

13.1. The tribunician power stirred up the causes of all the seditions, which, under the pretence indeed of protecting the commons—for whose aid it was devised—but in fact acquiring dominion for itself, courted the zeal and favour of the people with agrarian, corn, and judiciary laws. In all these there was an appearance of fairness.

13.2. For what was so just as that the commons should recover their own from the senators, lest a people victor over nations and possessor of the world should live as an exile from its hearths and altars?

13.3. What so fair as that a needy

13.4. people should live out of its own treasury? What more effective for the right of equalising liberty than that, while the senate governed the provinces, the authority of the equestrian order should rest at least upon the kingdom of the courts? But these very things turned to ruin,

13.5. and the wretched state was, to its own destruction, the prize.

13.6. For the power of the courts transferred from the senate to the knight suppressed the revenues, that

13.7. is, the patrimony of empire; and the purchase of corn drained the very sinews of the state, the treasury. And how could the commons be brought back into the fields whence they could be, without the overthrow of the possessors, who were themselves a part of the people and now held by age, as though by right, the seats left them by their ancestors?

14.1. The first torch of the conflicts Tiberius Gracchus kindled,

14.2. in birth, beauty, and eloquence easily the first. But he, whether fearing the contagion of the Mancinian surrender, because he had been a surety of the treaty and thence became a man of the people,

14.3. or led by what was fair and good, because he pitied the commons driven from their own fields,

14.4. with whatever mind he dared a mighty thing. When the day of the bill was at hand, surrounded by a vast throng, he mounted the rostra; nor was there lacking, with a hostile band, the whole nobility from the other side;

14.5. and the tribunes were on both sides. But when Gracchus saw Gaius Octavius interposing against his laws, against the sacred right of the college and the right of office, laying violent hands upon him, he thrust him from the rostra, and so terrified him with the present fear of death that he was forced to resign his magistracy.

14.6. So, made triumvir for dividing the lands, when, to carry through what he had begun, he wished his power to be prolonged to himself on the day of the elections, the nobility met him with the band of those whom he had moved from their fields.

14.7. The slaughter began from the forum; then, when he had fled to the Capitol and was exhorting the commons to the defence of his safety, touching his head with his hand, he gave the appearance of one demanding a kingdom and a diadem for himself; and so, under the leadership of Scipio Nasica, the people being roused to arms, he was overwhelmed as though by right.

15.1. At once both the avenger of his brother's death and of his laws, Gaius Gracchus, took fire with no less impetus;

15.2. who, when with like tumult and terror he was summoning the commons to their ancestral fields and promising the people the recent inheritance of Attalus for their sustenance,

15.3. and now, immoderate and unrestrained in a second tribunate, was ranging about with the commons favouring him,

15.4. when the tribune Minucius dared to bring forward measures against his laws, relying on the band of his companions, he invaded the Capitol, fatal to his family.

15.5. Thence, driven off by the slaughter of those nearest him, when he had withdrawn to the Aventine, there too, met by the band of the senate, he was overwhelmed by the consul Opimius.

15.6. There was insult done even to the remains of his death, and that sacrosanct head of a tribune of the commons was paid for to his slayers with its weight in gold.

16.1. None the less Apuleius Saturninus did not cease to champion the Gracchan laws. So much spirit did Marius give to the man, always an enemy to the nobility, and besides confident in his own consulship. Aulus Ninnius, his competitor for the tribunate, having been slain openly at the elections, he tried to substitute in his place Gaius Gracchus, a man without a tribe, without a sponsor, without a name; but, by a counterfeit title, he himself adopted him into the family.

16.2. When he exulted unpunished in so many and so great mockeries, he so vehemently pressed the passing of the Gracchan laws that he even forced the senate to swear to the words, threatening those who refused with interdiction from fire and water.

16.3. Yet one stood forth who preferred exile. So, after the flight of Metellus, the whole nobility being struck down, when he was now lording it for the third year, he advanced to such a pitch of madness that he disturbed even the consular elections with fresh slaughter.

16.4. For, that he might make Glaucia, the attendant of his frenzy, consul, he ordered Gaius Memmius, his competitor, to be killed, and in that tumult joyfully received the title of king from his attendants.

16.5. Then indeed, the senate now conspiring, Marius himself too, now consul, being opposed, because he could not protect him, the battle-lines were drawn up in the forum;

16.6. driven thence, he invaded the Capitol. But when, the pipes being cut off, he was besieged, and gave the senate proof of his repentance through envoys, having come down from the citadel with the leaders of his faction, he was received into the senate-house. There, an irruption being made, the people, having covered him with clubs and stones, mangled him even in his very death.

17.1. Last of all, Livius Drusus, trying to champion the same laws not only by the strength of the tribunate but also by the authority of the senate itself and the consent of all Italy,

17.2. while he reached for one thing out of another, kindled so great a conflagration that he could not endure even its first flame, and, carried off by a sudden death, handed down a hereditary war to his posterity.

17.3. By the judiciary law of Gracchus they had divided the Roman people and made one city two-headed. The Roman knights, supported by so great a power that they held the fates and fortunes of the leading men in their hands, intercepting the revenues, plundered the state by their own right; the senate, weakened by the exile of Metellus and the condemnation of Rutilius, had lost all the dignity of its majesty.

17.4. In this state of things, equal in resources, in spirit, in rank (whence too the rivalry was born in Livius Drusus), Servilius Caepio championed the knight, Livius Drusus the senate.

17.5. Standards, eagles, and banners were lacking: for the rest, in one city, as in two camps, there was discord. Caepio first, making an attack upon the senate, chose as defendants of bribery Scaurus and Philippus, the leaders of the nobility.

17.6. To resist these movements, Drusus roused the commons to himself by the Gracchan laws, and the allies by the same to the commons by the hope of citizenship. There survives an utterance of his own, that he had left nothing for largess to anyone, unless one should wish to divide the mud or the sky.

17.7. The day of promulgation was at hand, when suddenly so great a multitude of men appeared from every side that the city seemed besieged by the coming of enemies.

17.8. Yet the consul Philippus dared to oppose the laws; but an officer, having seized him by the throat, did not let him go until the blood flowed back into his mouth and eyes.

17.9. So by violence the laws were passed and ordained. And the allies at once demanded the price of the bill, when a timely death—as in such a crisis—carried off Drusus, unequal and sick of things rashly set in motion. Nor for that reason did the allies cease to demand of the Roman people, by arms, the promises of Drusus.

18.1. Let it be called the Social war, to lessen the odium, yet if we will the truth, it was a civil war. For since the Roman people had mingled with itself the Etruscans, Latins, and Sabines, and draws one blood from all, it made a body of its members, and is one out of all;

18.2. nor was it a less crime that the allies rebelled within Italy than the citizens within the city.

18.3. And so, when the allies most justly demanded the right of citizenship, of that state which they had increased by their strength—to which hope Drusus had roused them out of his lust of dominion—

18.4. after he was overwhelmed by domestic crime, the same torch that burned him kindled the allies to arms and to the storming of the city.

18.5. What sadder than this disaster? What more calamitous? When all Latium and Picenum, all Etruria and Campania, in short Italy, rose up against its own mother and parent the city;

18.6. when all the flower of the bravest and most faithful allies had under its own standards those municipal prodigies, Poppaedius the Marsi and Paeligni, Afranius the Latins, Plotius the Umbrians, Egnatius the Etruscans,

18.7. Telesinus the Samnites and Lucanians; when the people that was arbiter of kings and nations could not govern itself, and Rome, victress of Asia and Europe, was assailed from Corfinium.

18.8. The first plan of the war was that on the Alban mount, on the festival day of the Latins, the consuls Julius Caesar and Marcius Philippus should be slaughtered among the sacred rites and the altars.

18.9. After this crime was broken up by betrayal, all the frenzy burst out at Asculum, when, in the very throng of the games, the envoys who were then present from the city were slaughtered.

18.10. This was the sacrament of the impious war. Thence now everywhere, from every part of Italy, with Poppaedius, the leader and author of the war, ranging about, the standards sounded in different directions through the peoples and cities.

18.11. Neither of Hannibal nor of Pyrrhus was the devastation so great. Behold Ocriculum, behold Grumentum, behold Faesulae, behold Carseoli, Aesernia, Nuceria, Picentia, utterly laid waste with fire and sword. The forces of Rutilius were routed, the forces of Caepio routed.

18.12. For Julius Caesar himself, his army lost, when he was carried back bloody into the city, made a path through the midst of the city with a pitiable funeral.

18.13. But the great fortune of the Roman people, and ever greater in adversity, rose up again with all its strength anew; and, attacking the peoples one by one, Cato scattered the Etruscans, Gabinius the Marsi, Carbo the Lucanians, Sulla the Samnites;

18.14. Pompeius Strabo indeed, having laid waste all with flames and sword, made no end of slaughter until, by the destruction of Asculum, satisfaction was made, as best it might be, to the shades by the hands of so many armies, of the consuls, and of the plundered cities.

19.1. Although it was with allies—a crime—yet it was with free men and freeborn that the fighting was done: who could bear with equanimity wars of slaves among the foremost of peoples? The first slave war, in the early days of the city, was attempted within the very city under the leadership of Herdonius the Sabine, when, the state being occupied with the tribunician seditions, the Capitol was besieged and recovered by the consul;

19.2. but this was a tumult rather than a war. Soon, the empire being occupied in the various parts of the world, who would believe that Sicily was laid waste far more bloodily in the slave war than in the Punic? A land fruitful of crops and in a manner a suburban province, it was held by the great estates of Roman citizens.

19.3. Here, for the tilling of the soil, the crowded slave-prisons and the chained labourers furnished the material for war.

19.4. A certain Syrian by name Eunus—the greatness of the disasters makes us remember it—feigning a fanatic frenzy, while he tossed his hair in honour of the Syrian goddess, roused the slaves to liberty and arms as though by the command of

19.5. the gods; and, to prove that it was done by divine power, hiding in his mouth a nut which he had stuffed with sulphur and fire, breathing gently, he poured forth a flame amid his words.

19.6. This marvel at first made two thousand of those he met, soon, the slave-prisons being broken open by the right of war, an army of more than sixty thousand; and, decked with the insignia of a king, that nothing of evil might be lacking, he laid waste

19.7. the villages, towns, and strongholds with pitiable plundering. Nay, that last disgrace too of the war, the camps of the praetors were taken—nor will it shame us to name them—the camps of Manlius, Lentulus, Piso, Hypsaeus. And so they who ought to have been dragged off by slave-catchers were themselves pursuing the praetorian leaders fleeing from battle. At last, under the general Perperna, punishment was exacted of them.

19.8. For he, having consumed by famine, as by a pestilence, those at last conquered and besieged at Henna, punished the remnants of the brigands with fetters, chains, and crosses; and he was content with an ovation over slaves, lest he should sully the dignity of a triumph with a servile inscription.

19.9. The island had scarcely taken breath, when at once, under the praetor Servilius, there was a return from the Syrian to the Cilician. Athenio, a shepherd, having killed his master, ordered under his standards the household freed from the slave-prison.

19.10. He himself, in purple raiment and with a silver staff and his brow bound in royal fashion, raised an army no smaller than that fanatic before him, and, much more fiercely, as though to avenge him too, plundering villages, towns, and strongholds, raged against the slaves more savagely than against the masters, as though against deserters,

19.11. The praetorian armies were routed by him too, the camp of Servilius taken, the camp of Lucullus taken. But Titus Aquilius, following the example of Perperna, cutting off the enemy from supplies, drove them to the extreme and easily destroyed their forces, diminished by famine, with arms; and they would have surrendered, had they not, through fear of punishment, preferred a voluntary death.

19.12. Nor even of their leader could punishment be exacted, although he came alive into our hands; for, while the multitude contended about seizing him, the prey was torn to pieces among the hands of those quarrelling.

20.1. But indeed even the disgrace of arming slaves one might endure; for although by fortune they are liable in all things, yet they are as it were a second race of men and are adopted into the goods of our liberty: the war stirred up under the leadership of Spartacus, by what name to call it I know not;

20.2. for, since slaves served as soldiers and gladiators commanded, the one men of the lowest condition, the other of the worst, they increased by their mockeries the Roman calamity.

20.3. Spartacus, Crixus, and Oenomaus, having broken out from the school of Lentulus, with thirty or more men of the same fortune, burst out of Capua; and, slaves being summoned to their standard, when at once more than ten thousand had come together, men at first content to have escaped, now wished also to be avenged.

20.4. The first seat that pleased them, as for raging beasts, was Mount Vesuvius. There, when they were being besieged by Clodius Glabro, slipping down through the jaws of the hollow mountain by ropes of vine-branches, they descended to its lowest roots, and by an unseen outlet, with a sudden onset, seized the camp of the leader who expected nothing of the kind;

20.5. thence another camp, that of Varenius, then that of Thoranius; and they ranged over the whole of Campania. Nor content with laying waste villas and villages, they ravaged Nola and Nuceria, Thurii and Metapontum, with terrible slaughter.

20.6. With forces flowing in day by day, when there was now a regular army, they made for themselves rude shields of wickerwork and of the hides of cattle, and swords and weapons of the iron of the slave-prisons re-forged.

20.7. And, that nothing of distinction might be lacking to a regular army, cavalry was provided by taming the herds they met, and the insignia and rods taken from the praetors they brought to their leader.

20.8. Nor did he refuse them, a soldier from a tributary Thracian, from a soldier a deserter, then a brigand, then,

20.9. in honour of his strength, a gladiator. Nay, the funerals too of the leaders who fell in battle he celebrated with imperial obsequies, and ordered captives to fight in arms round the pyre, as though plainly to expiate all his past disgrace, if from a gladiator he had become a giver of shows.

20.10. Thence, attacking even men of consular rank, he cut down the army of Lentulus in the Apennines, and at Mutina destroyed the camp of Publius Crassus.

20.11. Elated by these victories, he deliberated—what is enough for our disgrace—about invading the city of Rome.

20.12. At last, with all the strength of the empire, there is a rising against a murmillo, and Licinius Crassus championed the Roman honour; by whom, driven off and put to flight—it is shameful to say—

20.13. the enemy fled into the farthest part of Italy. There, shut in around the Bruttian corner, when they were preparing flight into Sicily and ships were not at hand, and were trying in vain rafts of beams and casks bound together with branches on the most rapid strait, at last, a sally being made, they died a death worthy

20.14. of men, and, as was fitting under a gladiator leader, the fighting was without quarter. Spartacus himself, fighting most bravely in the front rank, was slain like a general.

21.1. This one thing was wanting to the misfortunes of the Roman people, that it should now within itself draw the parricidal weapon at home, and that in the middle of the city and the forum, as in an arena, citizens should run together against their own fellow citizens in gladiatorial fashion.

21.2. I should bear it with a calmer mind, somehow, if plebeian leaders, or, if nobles, at least bad men had given the leadership to crime. But then indeed—what an outrage!—what men! what generals! the ornaments and glories of their age, Marius and Sulla, lent even their own dignity to a most wicked deed.

21.3. The civil war, Marian or Sullan, was waged, so to speak, under three constellations. First with a slight and moderate tumult rather than a war, the savagery resting only among the leaders of arms themselves;

21.4. then more atrociously and bloodily, victory raging through the very vitals of the senate;

21.5. last of all it surpassed not only civic but even hostile frenzy, when the fury of arms rested upon the strength of all Italy, the hatreds raging so far that those failed who were to be slain.

21.6. The beginning and cause of the war was the insatiable hunger of Marius for honours, while by the Sulpician law he tried to take the province decreed to Sulla. But, impatient of the wrong, Sulla at once wheeled his legions about, and, Mithridates being put off, poured a twofold column into the city through the Esquiline and Colline gates.

21.7. Then, when the consuls Sulpicius and Albinovanus had opposed their bands, and stones and weapons were hurled from the walls on every side, he too, hurling fires, made his way, and, victor, occupied as a captive the citadel of the Capitol, which had escaped even the Carthaginians, even the Senonian Gauls.

21.8. Then, by a decree of the senate, his adversaries being judged enemies, justice was done upon the present tribune and others of the opposing faction by right; Marius a servile flight rescued, nay, fortune reserved him for another war.

21.9. Under the consuls Cornelius Cinna and Gnaeus Octavius the ill-quenched fire revived, and indeed from their own discord, when the question of recalling those whom the senate had judged enemies was referred to the people;

21.10. the assembly indeed girt with swords, but, those prevailing to whom peace and quiet were preferable, Cinna, a fugitive from his own country, fled to the party. Marius returned from Africa greater for his disaster; since prison, chains, flight, and exile had made his dignity terrible.

21.11. And so at the name of so great a man there is a running together far and wide, slaves—unspeakable—and the slave-prisons are armed, and the general easily found an army.

21.12. And so, demanding his country back by force, whence by force he had been driven, he might have seemed to act by right, had he not spoiled his own cause by savagery. But when he returned hostile to gods and men, at once at the first onset Ostia, the dependent and foster-child of the city, was plundered with unspeakable slaughter.

21.13. Soon the city is entered by a fourfold column. Cinna, Marius, Carbo, and Sertorius divided their forces. Here, after all the band of Octavius was driven from the Janiculum, at once, the signal being given for the slaughter of the leading men, there was raging somewhat more savagely than even in a Punic city.

21.14. The head of the consul Octavius was set out before the rostra, that of Antonius, a man of consular rank, on the very table of Marius. Caesar and Fimbria were slaughtered at the household gods of their own homes, the father and son of the Crassi in the mutual sight of each other. The hooks of the executioners dragged Baebius and Numitorius through the midst of the forum.

21.15. Catulus, by drinking in fire, snatched himself from the mockery of his enemies.

21.16. Merula, the flamen of Jupiter, on the Capitol bespattered the very eyes of Jupiter with the blood of his veins. Ancharius was stabbed before the very eyes of Marius, because, of course, he had not held out that fatal hand to him as he saluted.

21.17. So many funerals of the senate that seventh purple robe of Marius gave between the Kalends and the Ides of the month of January. What would have happened, had he filled out the year of his consulship?

21.18. Under the consuls Scipio and Norbanus that third whirlwind of civil madness thundered down with full fury, when on the one side eight legions and five hundred cohorts stood in arms, on the other Sulla hastened from Asia with a victorious army.

21.19. And indeed, since Marius had been so fierce against the Sullans, what savagery was needed for Sulla to be avenged on Marius? First at Capua, by the river Vulturnus, the standards clashed, and at once the whole army of Norbanus was routed, at once the forces of Scipio, a hope of peace being held out, were overwhelmed.

21.20. Then Marius the younger and Carbo, the consuls, as though despairing of victory, lest they should perish unavenged, made offerings to their shades in advance with the blood of the senate, and, the senate-house being besieged, those to be slaughtered were led out of the senate as from a prison.

21.21. How many funerals in the forum, in the circus, in the inmost shrines! For Mucius Scaevola the pontiff, having embraced the altars of Vesta, was all but buried in the same fire.

21.22. Lamponius and Telesinus, the Samnite leaders, laid waste Campania and Etruria more atrociously than Pyrrhus and Hannibal, and under the pretext of party they avenged themselves.

21.23. At the Sacriportus and the Colline gate all the forces of the enemy were finished off; there Marius, here Telesinus, was overwhelmed. Nor yet was the end of the slaughter the same as the end of the war. For swords were drawn even in peace, and justice was done upon those who had surrendered of their own accord. It is the lesser thing that at the Sacriportus, at the Colline gate, Sulla cut down more than seventy thousand: it was war.

21.25. Four thousand unarmed citizens who had surrendered he ordered to be slain in the Villa Publica: are these so many in peace not more? And who can reckon those whom anyone who wished slew here and there in the city? Until, on Fufidius reminding him that some ought to live, that there might be those over whom he might rule, that vast tablet was set up, and from the very flower of the equestrian order and the senate two thousand were chosen who should be ordered to die: an edict of a new kind.

21.26. It would be long, after these things, to relate the fates of Carbo, held up to mockery, the fates of Soranus, the Plaetorii and Venuleii, Baebius torn to pieces without steel after the manner of beasts among men's hands, Marius, the brother of the leader himself, at the tomb of Catulus, his eyes dug out, his hands and legs broken, kept alive for a while, that he might die

21.27. limb by limb. One might bear the penalties of single men: the most splendid municipalities of Italy came under the hammer—Spoletium, Interamnium, Praeneste, Florentia.

21.28. For Sulmo, an old town, an ally and friend—an unworthy deed—he does not storm or besiege by the right of war; but as men condemned to death are ordered to be led off, so Sulla ordered the condemned city to be destroyed.

22.1. The Sertorian war—what more was it than the inheritance of the Sullan proscription? Whether I should call it hostile or civil I know not, since the Lusitani and Celtiberi waged it under a Roman leader.

22.2. An exile and fugitive of that deadly tablet, a man of the highest but most calamitous valour, he embroiled by his misfortunes seas and lands; and, having now tried his fortune in Africa, now in the Balearic islands, he penetrated as far as the Ocean and the Fortunate Isles in his designs, and at last armed Spain.

22.3. The man easily agreed with men. Nor at any other time did the vigour of the Spanish soldier appear more than under a Roman leader.

22.4. Yet he, not content with Spain, looked also to Mithridates and the men of Pontus, and aided the king with a fleet.

22.5. And what would have been enough against so great an enemy, whom the Roman state could not resist under a single general? Gnaeus Pompeius was added to Metellus.

22.6. These men wore down his forces, having pursued him through almost the whole of Spain. There was long fighting, and always with a doubtful line of battle; nor yet was he extinguished by war before he was extinguished by the crime and treachery of his own men. The first contests were held through the legates, when on this side Domitius and Thorius, on that the Hirtuleii, skirmished;

22.7. soon, the former being overwhelmed near Segovia, the latter near the river Ana, the leaders themselves, trying each other at close quarters near Lauron and Sucron, made the disasters equal. Then, the one turning to the ravaging of fields,

22.8. the other to the destruction of cities, wretched Spain, among Roman leaders, paid the penalty of their discord;

22.9. until, Sertorius being overwhelmed by domestic treachery, Perperna conquered and surrendered, the cities too came into Roman allegiance—Osca, Termes, Ulia, Valentia, Auxuma, and Calagurris, which tried everything in its famine. So Spain was received into peace. The victorious leaders wished it to seem a foreign rather than a civil war, that they might triumph.

23.1. Under the consuls Marcus Lepidus and Quintus Catulus, the civil war was almost crushed sooner than it began: but whatever the torch of that disturbance, it blazed up from the very pyre of Sulla.

23.2. Eager for revolution out of insolence, Lepidus was preparing to rescind the acts of so great a man; nor undeservedly, if only he could have done it without great calamity to the state.

23.3. For when Sulla the dictator had, by the right of war, proscribed his enemies, those who survived, when Lepidus recalled them, what else were they but summoned to war? And when the goods of the condemned citizens, by Sulla's assignment, though ill gotten, were yet held by right, the demand for them back beyond doubt was

23.4. shaking the settled condition of the state. It was expedient, then, for the sick and wounded state, as it were, to be quiet by any means, lest its wounds should be torn open by the very cure.

23.5. So, when by turbulent assemblies he had terrified the state as with a trumpet, having set out into Etruria, he was bringing arms thence and an army against the city.

23.6. But already Lutatius Catulus and Gnaeus Pompeius, the leaders and standard-bearers of the Sullan dominion, had occupied with another army the Mulvian bridge and the Janiculan hill.

23.7. Driven back by these at the very first onset, and judged an enemy by the senate, in a bloodless flight he withdrew into Etruria, thence into Sardinia, and there perished of disease and remorse.

23.8. The victors too, what was not lightly the case in civil wars, were content with peace.

1.1. Catiline—luxury first, then the want of family fortune kindled by it, and at the same time the opportunity, that Roman arms were ranging at the farthest borders of the world—drove into nefarious designs of overthrowing his own country.

1.2. To stab the senate, to slaughter the consuls, to ravage the city with fires, to plunder the treasury, in short to abolish the whole state from its foundations and whatever Hannibal would not even have seemed to wish, with what allies—

1.3. O crime—he attempted! He himself a patrician; but this is the lesser thing: the Curii, the Porcii, the Sullae, the Cethegi, the Autronii, the Vargunteii, and the Longini—what families! what ornaments of the senate! Lentulus too, then at the very time a praetor. All these he had as attendants of his most monstrous deed.

1.4. There was added as a pledge of the conspiracy human blood, which, carried round in cups, they drank: the highest crime, were it not yet greater,

1.5. for the sake of which they drank. It was all over with the fairest of empires, had not that conspiracy fallen upon the consuls Cicero and Antonius, of whom the one by industry disclosed the matter, the other by force suppressed it.

1.6. The information of so great a crime emerged through Fulvia, a most worthless harlot, but more innocent than the patricians.

1.7. The consul, a senate being held, made a speech against the accused present; but no more was effected than that he escaped as an enemy and then threatened openly and avowedly to quench his own fire with ruin.

1.8. And he indeed set out to the army prepared by Manlius in Etruria, to bring his standards against the city. Lentulus, prophesying to himself the kingdom destined for his family by the Sibylline verses, disposed throughout the whole city, on the day fixed by Catiline, men, torches,

1.9. and weapons. Nor content with a citizen conspiracy, he solicited to arms the envoys of the Allobroges, who chanced then to be present. The frenzy would have gone beyond the Alps, had not, by another betrayal, the letters of the praetor Volturcius been seized. At once, by Cicero's command, hands were laid upon the barbarians;

1.10. the praetor was openly convicted in the senate. While they debated his punishment, Caesar judged that his rank should be spared, Cato that he should be punished for his crime.

1.11. All following which opinion, the parricides were strangled in prison. Although part of the conspiracy was suppressed, yet Catiline did not desist from what he had begun; making for his country with hostile standards from Etruria, he was overwhelmed by the army of Antonius that met him.

1.12. How fiercely the fighting was done, the issue showed. No one of the enemy survived the battle; the place which each had taken in fighting, that, his life lost, he covered with his body. Catiline was found far from his own men among the corpses of the enemy, in a most beautiful death, had he so fallen for his country.

2.1. Now, almost the whole world being at peace, the Roman empire was too great to be overthrown by any foreign strength. And so Fortune, envying the people that was foremost of nations, armed it for its own destruction.

2.2. And the Marian and Cinnan frenzy had indeed already played a prelude within the city, as though making trial. The Sullan tempest had thundered more widely, yet within Italy.

2.3. The frenzy of Caesar and Pompey seized the city, Italy, nations, peoples, in short the whole empire as far as it extended, as it were in a kind of deluge and conflagration, so that it should not rightly be called civil only,

2.4. nor even social, nor yet foreign, but rather a kind of common thing made of all and more than a war.

2.5. For if you look at its leaders, the whole senate was in the parties; if at the armies, here eleven legions, there eighteen, all the flower and strength of Italian blood; if at the auxiliaries of the allies, here the Gallic and German levies, there Deiotarus, Ariobarzanes, Tarcondimotus, Cotys and Rhascypolis, all the strength of Thrace, Cappadocia, Macedonia, Cilicia,

2.6. Greece, and the whole east; if at the duration of the war, four years, but, for the disaster of affairs, brief; if at the place and extent, it was begun within Italy, thence turned aside into Gaul and Spain, and, returning from the west, settled with all its strength in Epirus and Thessaly; thence it suddenly leaped into Egypt, thence looked back to Asia, fell upon Africa, and at last wheeled back into Spain, and there at length came to an end.

2.7. But the hatreds of the parties were not ended with the war. For they did not rest before, in the very city, in the middle of the senate, the hatreds of the victor sated themselves with the slaughter of those who had been conquered.

2.8. The cause of so great a calamity was the same as of all, excessive prosperity. For when, under the consuls Quintus Metellus and Lucius Afranius, the Roman majesty prevailed over the whole world, and Rome was singing of recent victories, the Pontic and Armenian triumphs, in the Pompeian theatres, the excessive power of Pompey, as is usual, stirred up envy among the idle citizens.

2.9. Metellus, on account of his diminished Cretan triumph, and Cato, always cross-grained against the powerful, disparaged Pompey and clamoured against his acts. This resentment drove him athwart and impelled him to procure supports for his dignity.

2.10. It chanced then that Crassus flourished in birth, riches, and rank, so that yet he wished for increased resources; Gaius Caesar was being raised up by his eloquence and spirit, and now, behold, by his consulship too; yet Pompey was eminent between the two.

2.11. So then, Caesar wishing to procure dignity, Crassus to increase his, Pompey to retain his, and all alike being desirous of power, they easily agreed about invading the state.

2.12. So then, while with their mutual strength each strove for his own glory, Caesar invaded Gaul, Crassus Asia, Pompey Spain: three mighty armies, and in these the dominion of the world was seized by the partnership

2.13. of three chiefs. Ten years that domination held by good faith, because they were held by mutual fear. By the death of Crassus among the Parthians, by the death of Julia, Caesar's daughter, who, married to Pompey, contained the harmony of son-in-law and father-in-law by the bond of marriage, at once rivalry burst out.

2.14. Now Caesar's power was suspect to Pompey, and Pompey's dignity grievous to Caesar. Nor did the one endure an equal, nor the other a superior. O crime! Thus they laboured over the principate, as though the fortune of so great an empire could not contain two.

2.15. So then, under the consuls Lentulus and Marcellus, the bond of the conspiracy was first broken. The senate, that is, Pompey, was agitating about a successor to Caesar; nor did he refuse, if account were taken of him at the next elections.

2.16. That the consulship should be given to him in his absence, which ten tribunes, with Pompey's favour, had lately decreed, was now denied, the same Pompey dissembling: let him come and stand for it after the manner of his ancestors.

2.17. He, on the contrary, demanded that the decrees be kept, and, unless faith were maintained, would not send back his army. So a decree is passed against him as an enemy. Stirred by these things, Caesar resolved to defend by arms the rewards of arms.

2.18. The first arena of the civil war was Italy, whose strongholds Pompey had occupied with light garrisons; but all

2.19. was suddenly overwhelmed by Caesar's onset. The first standards sounded at Ariminum. Then Libo was driven from Etruria, Thermus from Umbria, Domitius from Corfinium. And the war had been finished without bloodshed, had he been able to overwhelm Pompey at Brundisium.

2.20. And he had taken him; but he escaped by a nocturnal flight through the barriers of the besieged harbour. Shameful to tell: of late the chief of the senators, the moderator of peace and war, was fleeing in a battered and almost unarmed ship over a sea he had himself triumphed over.

2.21. Nor was the flight of Pompey from Italy more shameful than that of the senate from the city: which, almost empty for fear, Caesar entered and made himself consul. The sacred treasury too, because the tribunes opened it too slowly, he ordered to be broken open, and seized the census and patrimony of the Roman people before the empire.

2.22. Pompey driven off and put to flight, he chose rather first to order the provinces than to pursue him. Sicily and Sardinia,

2.23. the pledges of the corn-supply, he held through legates. There was nothing hostile in Gaul; he himself had made peace. But to him, crossing through it to the Spanish armies of Pompey, Massilia dared to shut its gates. Wretched, while it desires peace, through fear of war it fell into war; but because it was safe in its walls, he ordered it to be conquered for him in his absence.

2.24. The little Greek state, not according to the softness of its name, dared both to break the rampart and to burn the engines, and even to engage in ships;

2.25. but Brutus, to whom the war had been entrusted, utterly subdued the conquered by land and sea. Soon, as they surrendered, all was taken from them save liberty, which they held dearer than all.

2.26. The war in Spain with the legates of Gnaeus Pompeius, Petreius and Afranius, was doubtful and varied but bloodless, whom, as they held their camp at Ilerda by the river Sicoris, he set about to besiege and to cut off from the town.

2.27. Meanwhile the overflowing of the river in spring kept off supplies: so the camp was tried by famine,

2.28. and the besieger himself was as it were besieged. But when the peace of the river returned, and opened the fields both to plunder and to battle, again fierce he pressed on, and, following them as they withdrew to Celtiberia, by a mound and a rampart and through these by thirst he drove them to surrender.

2.29. So nearer Spain was received, nor did the farther make delay. For what could one legion do after five? And so, Varro yielding of his own accord, Gades, the strait, the Ocean, all followed the good fortune of Caesar.

2.30. Yet Fortune dared something against the absent leader about Illyricum and Africa, as though of set purpose she might shine with adverse things amid his prosperous;

2.31. for when Dolabella and Antonius, ordered to occupy the jaws of the Adriatic Sea, had pitched camp, the one on the Illyrian, the other on the Curictan shore, Pompey now widely holding the seas, suddenly his legate Octavius Libo with vast forces of marines surrounded both.

2.32. Famine wrung surrender from Antonius. The rafts too sent by Basilus to his aid, such as the scarcity of ships had made, were taken by a new art of the Pompeians, the Cilicians, with ropes drawn beneath the sea, as though by a net.

2.33. Yet two the tide set free. One, which carried the men of Opitergium, stuck in the shallows and gave a memorable example to posterity. For a band of scarcely a thousand young men, an army poured round on every side, for a whole day withstood the weapons, and, when valour found no outlet, at last, lest it should come to surrender, the tribune Vulteius exhorting them, they ran upon one another with mutual blows.

2.34. In Africa too the valour and the calamity of Curio were alike, who, sent to recover the province, proud after the rout and flight of Varus, could not withstand the sudden coming of King Juba and the cavalry of the Moors. Flight lay open to the conquered; but shame persuaded him to follow with his death the army lost by his own rashness.

2.35. But now Fortune, demanding the debt due to the pair, Pompey had chosen Epirus as the seat of the war; nor did Caesar delay.

2.36. For, all being ordered in his rear, although mid-winter forbade by storm, he sailed to the war;

2.37. and, his camp being pitched at Oricum, when part of his army, on account of the scarcity of ships, had been left with Antonius and was delaying at Brundisium, he was so impatient that, to fetch them, the sea blazing with winds, in the dead of night, in a scout-boat alone he tried to go. There survives his own saying to the pilot, fearful in so great a peril: "What do you fear? You carry Caesar." All his forces being drawn together from every side into one, and camps being pitched at close quarters, the counsels of the leaders were different.

2.38. Caesar, fierce by nature and eager to finish the business, displayed his line, provoked, harried;

2.39. now by the siege of the camp, which he had surrounded with a rampart of sixteen miles—but what could a siege harm those who, the sea lying open, abounded in all supplies?—now by the fruitless storming of Dyrrachium, since its very situation made it impregnable;

2.40. to this, by continual battles in the enemy's sallies, at which time the remarkable valour of the centurion Scaeva shone forth, in whose shield a hundred and twenty weapons stuck;

2.41. now by the plundering of the allied cities, when he laid waste Oricum and Gomphi and other strongholds

2.42. of Thessaly. Pompey, against these things, wove delays, shuffled, so to wear down the enemy, shut in on every side by scarcity of supplies, until the impetus of the most ardent leader should grow old.

2.43. Nor did the leader's salutary counsel avail longer. The soldiers reproached the leader's inactivity, the allies his delay, the chiefs his ambition. So, the fates hurrying on, Thessaly was taken for the battle, and to the Philippic fields were committed the fates of the city, of the empire, of the human race.

2.44. Never in any place did Fortune look upon so much of the strength of the Roman people, so much of its dignity: more than three hundred thousand on this side or that, besides the auxiliaries, the kings, and the senate.

2.45. Never were the prodigies of impending ruin more manifest: the flight of the victims, swarms on the standards, darkness by day. The leader himself, in a nocturnal vision, was encompassed with the applause of his own theatre after the manner of a lamentation, and in the morning was seen with a dark cloak—a thing unspeakable—at the headquarters.

2.46. Never was Caesar's army keener nor more eager; thence first the trumpets, thence the weapons. It was noted too of Crastinus, as he joined battle, his javelin, who soon, his sword being driven into his mouth—so he was found among the corpses—bore upon his face, by the very strangeness of the wound, the passion and frenzy with which he had fought.

2.47. But no less admirable was the issue of that war. For when Pompey so abounded in cavalry that he seemed likely easily to surround Caesar, he was himself surrounded.

2.48. For when they had long contended on equal terms, and at Pompey's command the cavalry had burst out routed from the wing, suddenly, a signal being given, the German cohorts made so great an onset upon the scattered horsemen that those seemed to be on foot,

2.49. these to come on horseback. The ruin of the light-armed troops accompanied this slaughter of the fleeing cavalry; then, the terror being more widely spread, the forces throwing one another into confusion, the rest of the slaughter was made as though by a single hand; nor did anything more cause their destruction than the very size of the army.

2.50. Caesar was much in that battle, midway between general and soldier. His words, too, as he rode about, were noted, the one bloody but skilful and effective for victory, "Soldier, strike the face!" the other composed for boasting, "Spare the citizens!"—

2.51. while he himself pursued Pompey, fortunate howsoever in his misfortunes, if the same fortune had carried him off as carried off his army. He lived on, the survivor of his own dignity, to flee with greater disgrace through the Thessalian Tempe on horseback, to put in at Lesbos in a single skiff, to debate at Syedra, on a desert rock of Cilicia, flight to the Parthians,

2.52. to Africa or Egypt, until at last, on the shore of Pelusium, by the command of a most worthless king, by the counsels of eunuchs, and—that nothing might be wanting to his misfortunes—by the sword of his own deserter Septimius, he was slaughtered, dying under the eyes of his wife and children.

2.53. Who would not have believed that all was over with Pompey? And yet far more fiercely and vehemently the ashes of the Thessalian fire grew warm again.

2.54. And in Egypt indeed there was a war against Caesar without parties.

2.55. For when Ptolemy, king of Alexandria, had carried through the highest crime of the civil war and had sealed a treaty of friendship with Caesar over the head of Pompey, Fortune, seeking vengeance for the shades of that most illustrious man, was not lacking a cause.

2.56. Cleopatra, the king's sister, prostrate at Caesar's knees, demanded back a part of the kingdom. There was at hand the beauty of the girl, which was doubled by this, that, being such, she seemed to have suffered wrong, and the hatred of the king himself,

2.57. who had given the slaughter of Pompey to the fate of the parties, not to Caesar, doubtless about to dare the same against him too, if there had been an occasion.

2.58. When Caesar ordered her to be restored to the kingdom, at once, besieged in the palace by those same slayers of Pompey, though with a very small band, he withstood the mass of a vast army with marvellous valour.

2.59. And first, by the burning of the neighbouring buildings and dockyards, he drove off the weapons of the hostile enemy, soon escaped suddenly to the peninsula of Pharos; thence driven off into the sea, by marvellous good fortune he swam to the nearest fleet, leaving indeed his cloak in the waves, whether by fate or by design, that it might be the mark for the enemy's weapons and stones as they pressed on.

2.60. Then, received by his marines, attacking the enemy at once from every side, he gave to the shades of his son-in-law the just due of an unwarlike and faithless nation. For both Theodotus, the master and author of the whole war, and those monsters not even of manhood, Pothinus and Ganymedes, in different flight by sea and land, were consumed by death. The body of the king himself, buried in the mud, was found in the honour of a golden cuirass.

2.61. In Asia too there was a new disturbance from Pontus, plainly as though Fortune of set purpose were seeking this end for the Mithridatic kingdom, that, as the father was conquered by Pompey, so the son should be conquered by Caesar.

2.62. King Pharnaces, trusting more in our discord than in his own valour, was rushing with a hostile column into Cappadocia.

2.63. But Caesar, attacking him, crushed him in one and, so to say, not even a whole battle, after the manner of a thunderbolt, which in one and the same moment comes, strikes, departs. Nor is Caesar's boast about himself vain, that the enemy was conquered before he was seen.

2.64. So with foreigners; but in Africa with citizens far more atrociously than at Pharsalia. Here a certain tide of flight had cast up the remnants of the shipwrecked parties; nor would you call them remnants, but a war entire.

2.65. The forces were scattered rather than crushed; the very calamity of their general had increased their oath, nor did the succession of leaders degenerate. For in place of Pompey's name there sounded amply enough Cato and Scipio. There was added to their forces Juba, king of Mauretania, doubtless that Caesar might conquer more widely.

2.66. There was nothing, then, between Pharsalia and Thapsus, save that the latter was larger; and the onset of the Caesarians was the fiercer, indignant that after Pompey the war had grown; in short, what never elsewhere, before the general's command, of their own accord the standards sounded.

2.67. The slaughter began from Juba, whose elephants, raw and lately come from the wood, terrified by the sudden blast of the trumpets, wheeled round upon their own men. At once the army turned to flight, nor were the leaders braver than to escape. Yet the death of all was not unmarked.

2.68. Now Scipio was fleeing in a ship; but, the enemy overtaking him, he drove his sword through his vitals, and, when someone asked where he was, answered this very thing: "The general is well." Juba, when he had withdrawn into his palace, feasted magnificently the next day with Petreius, his companion in flight, and over the table and the cups offered himself to him to be slain.

2.69. He sufficed both for the king and for himself, while meanwhile, amid the dishes half-eaten, the funeral viands

2.70. were drenched with royal and Roman blood at once. Cato was not present at the battle. His camp being pitched by the Bagradas, he was guarding Utica as a second barrier of Africa. But, the disaster of the parties being received, hesitating nothing, as became a wise man, he summoned death to himself even gladly.

2.71. For after he had dismissed his son and his companions from his embrace, in the night, having read by the lamp Plato's book which teaches the immortality of the soul, he gave himself a little to rest;

2.72. then, about the first watch, with a drawn sword he struck his bared breast once and again. Physicians dared after this to violate the man with fomentations. He endured it, until they withdrew; then he tore open the wounds, and, the force of his blood following, left his dying hands in the very wound, which he himself had twice made.

2.73. As though there had never been fighting, so again arms and parties; and as much as Africa was above Thessaly,

2.74. so much did Spain surpass Africa. Very great favour the brotherhood of the leaders gave to the parties, and that two Pompeys stood for one.

2.75. And so nowhere was there a more atrocious encounter, nor with so doubtful a struggle. First, in the very mouth of the Ocean, the legates Varus and Didius came to blows. But the war was fiercer with the sea itself than with each other in their ships, since, as though to chastise the civic frenzy,

2.76. the Ocean cut down both fleets in shipwreck. What a horror was that, when at the same time the waves, the storms, the men, the ships, the tackle clashed! Add the terror of the very situation, the shores of Spain on this side, of Mauretania on that, sloping into one, the sea both inland and outer, and the overhanging watchtowers of Hercules, when all on every side raged at once with battle and tempest.

2.77. Soon there was a ranging on both sides about the siege of cities, which, wretched, paid the penalty of the Roman alliance between these leaders and those. The last of all the contests was Munda.

2.78. Here, not according to his other good fortune, but a doubtful and long sad battle, so that Fortune plainly seemed to be deliberating something or other.

2.79. Indeed Caesar himself before the line was sadder than was his wont, whether from regard of human frailty, or holding the too long continuance of his prosperity suspect, or fearing the same things, after he had begun to be the same as Pompey; and in the very battle, what no one ever remembered,

2.80. when for a long time, the struggle being equal, the lines did no more than slay, in the midst of the ardour of the fighters there was suddenly a vast silence between both, as though there had been agreement, and this the feeling of all, "How long this?" At last an unwonted crime before Caesar's eyes:

2.81. after fourteen years the approved band of his veterans gave ground backward, who, although they had not yet fled, it appeared nevertheless were holding their ground by shame rather than by valour.

2.82. And so he, sending away his horse like one frenzied, ran forward into the front line. There, to grasp the fleeing, to encourage the standard-bearers, to entreat, exhort, reproach, in short through the whole column with his eyes, his hands, his voice to fly about.

2.83. He is said in that confusion to have debated with himself about the last extremity, and to have had a manifest look as though he wished to forestall death by his own hand, had not five cohorts of the enemy, led across the line, which Labienus had sent to the relief of his endangered camp, given the appearance of flight.

2.84. This either he himself believed, or the crafty leader seized for an opportunity, and, as though against men fleeing and now conquered, he both roused the spirits of his own men and struck down the enemy. For both these, while they think they are conquering, followed more bravely, and the Pompeians, while they believe their own men are fleeing, began to flee.

2.85. How great was the wrath and frenzy of the victors in slaughtering the enemy, you may thus estimate, that, when the fugitives from the battle had withdrawn to Munda, and Caesar had ordered the conquered to be at once besieged, a mound was made of heaped corpses, which, transfixed with javelins and darts, were held together among themselves—a thing foul even against barbarians.

2.86. But, the sons of Pompey doubtless despairing of victory, Gnaeus, a fugitive from the battle, wounded in the leg, making for desert and trackless places, was overtaken by Caesonius near the town of Lauron, and slain as he fought—so little did he yet despair;

2.87. Sextus Fortune meanwhile hid in Celtiberia and reserved for other wars after Caesar.

2.88. Caesar is found a victor in his country, drawing first a triumph over Gaul: here was the Rhine and the Rhône and, in gold, the captive Ocean. The second laurel was the Egyptian: then on the litters the Nile, Arsinoe, and the Pharos blazing in the likeness of fire.

2.89. The third chariot was over Pharnaces and Pontus. The fourth displayed Juba and Mauretania and Spain twice subdued. Pharsalia and Thapsus and Munda nowhere. And how much greater were the things over which he did not triumph!

2.90. Here at last was an end to arms; the rest was bloodless peace, and the war atoned for by clemency. No one was slain by his command save Afranius (he had pardoned enough once), and Faustus Sulla (Pompey had taught him to fear sons-in-law), and the daughter of Pompey with her little ones by Sulla (here he was guarding against posterity).

2.91. And so, the citizens not being ungrateful, all honours were heaped upon the chief: about the temples his images, in the theatre a crown marked with rays, a platform in the senate-house, a pediment on his house, a month in the heavens, to this the title father of his country himself and perpetual dictator, and last of all—doubtful whether with his own consent—the insignia of royalty offered before the rostra by the consul Antonius.

2.92. All which things were heaped, as it were like fillets, upon a victim destined for death. For envy overcame the chief's clemency, and the very power of his benefits was grievous to free men.

2.93. Nor was the dominion borne longer, but Brutus and Cassius and other senators consented to the slaughter of the chief.

2.94. How great the force of fate! The conspiracy had spread widely, a paper too was given to Caesar on the very day, nor could he obtain favourable omens with a hundred victims. Yet he came into the senate-house, meditating the Parthian expedition.

2.95. There, as he sat in his curule chair, the senate fell upon him, and with three-and-twenty wounds he was laid on the ground. So he who had filled the whole world with civil blood at last filled the senate-house with his own blood.

3.1. The Roman people, Caesar and Pompey being slaughtered, seemed to have returned to its former state of liberty. And it had returned,

3.2. had not either Pompey left sons or Caesar an heir, or—what was more pernicious than either—had not Antonius survived, once a colleague, soon a rival of Caesarean power, the torch and whirlwind of the following age.

3.3. For while Sextus seeks back his father's possessions, there was alarm over the whole sea; while Octavius avenges his father's death, Thessaly had to be stirred again;

3.4. while Antonius, of a fickle temper, either resents Octavius as the successor of Caesar or, through love of Cleopatra, falls away into a king * * *. For otherwise he could not be safe,

3.5. unless he had fled to servitude. Yet we must be thankful, in so great a confusion, that above all to Octavius Caesar Augustus the sum of things returned, who by his wisdom and skill ordered the body of the empire, struck down on every side and confounded, which beyond doubt could never have come together and agreed, had it not been governed as it were by the soul and mind of a single ruler.

3.7. Under the consuls Marcus Antonius and Publius Dolabella, fortune now transferring the Roman empire to Caesar, there was a various and manifold disturbance of the state. And as is wont to happen in the yearly revolution of the heavens, that the stars, when moved, thunder and signify their turnings by a tempest, so then, by the revolution of the Roman dominion, that is, of the human race, all things trembled to their depths, and with every kind of crisis—civil, foreign, servile, by land and sea—the whole body of the empire was agitated.

4.1. The first cause of the civil disturbances was the will of Caesar, of which Antonius, the second heir, furious that Octavius was preferred to himself, had undertaken an inexpiable war against the adoption

4.2. of that keenest of young men. For when he saw a youth within his eighteenth year, tender and exposed and open to wrong, himself full of dignity from his comradeship with Caesar, he tore the inheritance by thefts, assailed the man himself with reproaches, and by every art hindered the adoption into the Julian house;

4.3. in short, openly contrived arms to crush the youth, and now, an army being prepared, besieged in Cisalpine Gaul Decimus Brutus, who resisted his movements.

4.4. But Octavius Caesar, favoured both by his age and his wrong and by the majesty of the name which he had put on, having recalled the veterans to arms, a private man—who would believe it?—attacked the consul, freed Brutus from the siege of Mutina, stripped Antonius of his camp.

4.5. Then indeed he appeared fair even in arms. For, bloody and wounded, he was carrying back to the camp upon his own shoulders the eagle handed to him by the dying standard-bearer.

5.1. Another war was stirred up by the division of lands, which Caesar was paying to his father's veterans as the price of their service. The ever-evil temper of Antonius was then incited by Fulvia, a wife of manly soldiery, girt with a sword.

5.2. So, by inciting the colonists driven from their fields, she had again

5.3. stirred up arms. But here Caesar, attacking Antonius, now judged an enemy not by private but by the votes of the whole senate, drove him within the walls of Perusia and forced him to the extremity of surrender by a shameful famine that tried everything.

6.1. When Antonius alone too was grievous to peace, grievous to the state, Lepidus, like fire to a conflagration, was added. What against two consuls, two armies? It was necessary to come into the partnership of a most bloody treaty. The wishes of all were different, as their tempers.

6.2. Lepidus the desire of riches, the hope of which was from the confusion of the state, Antonius vengeance on those who had judged him an enemy, Caesar his unavenged father and Cassius and Brutus, grievous to his shades,

6.3. urged on. In this, as it were a treaty, peace is composed among the three leaders. At Confluentes, between Perusia and Bononia, they join hands, and the armies salute them. By no good precedent the triumvirate is entered upon, and, the state being overwhelmed by arms, the Sullan proscription returns, whose atrocity has nothing more notable than the number of a hundred and forty senators.

6.4. The ends were foul, fierce, and pitiable of those fleeing over the whole world. Who could but groan at the indignity, when Antonius proscribed his uncle Lucius Caesar, Lepidus his brother Lucius Paulus? To set the heads of the slain on the rostra was now usual at Rome;

6.5. but even so the state could not restrain its tears, when it saw the severed head of Cicero on those very rostra of his, and there was a running together to see him no otherwise than they were wont to gather to hear him.

6.6. These crimes were in the tablets of Antonius and Lepidus: Caesar was content with the slayers of his father, lest, if it had been unavenged, even his just slaughter should be held justified.

7.1. Brutus and Cassius seemed thus to have driven Caesar from his kingdom as a Tarquin the king, but the liberty which they wished above all to be restored they lost by that very parricide.

7.2. So, the slaughter being accomplished, when they feared the veterans of Caesar, and not undeservedly, they at once fled from the senate-house to the Capitol. Nor was there lacking to them the spirit for vengeance, but they had not yet a leader.

7.3. So, when it appeared what slaughter of the state was impending, vengeance was disapproved, since the slaying was condemned.

7.4. So, by the counsels of Cicero, an amnesty being decreed, yet, lest they should strike the eyes of the public grief, they withdrew into the provinces given by that very Caesar whom they had slain, Syria and Macedonia. So the vengeance of Caesar was deferred rather than suppressed.

7.5. So then, the state being ordered among the triumvirs more as it could be than as it ought, Lepidus being left for the protection of the city, Caesar with Antonius girds himself against Cassius and Brutus.

7.6. They, having got together vast forces, had occupied that same arena which was fatal to Gnaeus Pompeius. But not then either did the impending signs of the destined disaster lie hidden.

7.7. For both a swarm settled on the standards, and birds accustomed to the food of corpses flew round the camp as though already their own, and an Ethiopian meeting them as they advanced to the line was too plainly a deadly sign.

7.8. And to Brutus himself by night, when, a light being brought in after his custom, he was debating something with himself, a certain dark shape presented itself, and, being asked what it was, said, "I am your evil genius," and under his wondering eyes vanished.

7.9. With an equal foreboding of better things, in Caesar's camp all the birds and victims had promised well. But nothing was more excellent than that Caesar's physician was admonished by a dream that Caesar should leave the camp,

7.10. which was about to be taken; as it was. For battle being joined, when it had been fought for some while with equal ardour, and although the leaders were present on either side, here the one through bodily sickness, there the other through fear and cowardice had withdrawn themselves, yet there stood for the parties an unconquered fortune both of the avenger and of him who was being avenged, as the issue of the battle showed. First it was so doubtful

7.11. that—the peril being equal on both sides—on this side Caesar's camp was taken, on that Cassius's. But how much more effective is fortune than valour! And how true is what the dying Brutus breathed out, that virtue lies not in fact but only in word! Error gave them the victory in that battle.

7.12. Cassius, his own wing being beaten down, when, Caesar's camp being taken, he saw the cavalry returning at a rapid onset, thinking they fled, escaped to a hillock.

7.13. There, the dust and din, and the neighbouring night too taking away the sense of what had been done, when the scout sent for that purpose announced it too slowly, thinking it all over with the parties, he offered his head to be taken off by one of those nearest him.

7.14. Brutus, when in Cassius he had lost his own spirit too, lest he should unseal anything of the pledge of their agreement (for so it had been agreed that they should not survive the war), himself too offered his side to be stabbed by one of his companions.

7.15. Who does not wonder that men most wise and most brave at the last used not their own hands? Unless this too was from the persuasion of their sect, that they should not violate their hands, but, in the removal of bravest and most dutiful souls, should by their own judgement use another's crime.

8.1. The slayers of Caesar being removed, there remained the house of Pompey. One of the young men had fallen in Spain, the other had escaped by flight, and, having gathered the remnants of the unhappy war, when besides he had armed the slave-prisons, held Sicily and Sardinia; now too with a fleet he had occupied the middle sea.

8.2. O how different from his father! He had extinguished the Cilicians, this one defended himself by piracy. Puteoli, Formiae, Vulturnum, in short all Campania, the Pontian and Aenarian islands, the very mouth of the Tiber river, he plundered. Then, engaging Caesar's ships, he both burned and sank them; nor he only, but Menas and Menecrates, foul slaves, whom he had set over the fleet, ranging about plundering along all the shores.

8.3. For these so many successes, he made offering to the Pelorus with a hundred gilded oxen, and sent a living horse with gold into the strait, gifts to Neptune, that the ruler of the sea might suffer him to reign in his own sea. At last it came to such a crisis that a treaty and peace with the enemy—if indeed the son of Pompey was an enemy—was nevertheless struck.

8.4. How great, but brief, was that joy, when on the mole of the Baian shore it was agreed about his return and the restoration of his goods, and when, at his own invitation, men reclined to dine on his ship, and he, taunting his own lot, said, "These are my hulls"—not without wit, in that, since his father had dwelt in the most frequented part of the city, the Carinae, his own house and household gods hung in a ship.

8.5. But by the importunity of Antonius, and the plunder of the Pompeian goods, of which he had been the buyer, being devoured, the possession could not remain; he began to disclaim the compact of the treaty. And so there was a recourse to arms again, and now with all the strength of the empire a fleet was prepared against the young man, whose very contrivance was magnificent.

8.6. For, the barrier of the Herculean way being cut through and the shores dug back, the Lucrine lake was changed into a harbour, and to it, the middle being broken through, Avernus was added, that in that quiet of the waters the fleet, exercised, might rehearse the image of a naval war.

8.7. Assailed by so great a mass of war, the young man was overwhelmed in the Sicilian strait, and would have carried the fame of a great leader with him to the shades, had he attempted nothing further; but it is a sign of great natural ability ever to hope.

8.8. For, his affairs being lost, he fled and made for Asia under sail, about to come there into the hands of his enemies and into chains and—what is most wretched for brave men—to die at the enemy's pleasure under an executioner.

8.9. Not since Xerxes was there a more pitiable flight. For he who lately was master of three hundred and fifty ships fled with six or seven, the light of the admiral's ship being put out, his rings thrown into the sea, in fear and ever looking back, and yet fearing nothing but that he should perish.

9.1. Although in Cassius and Brutus he had taken away the parties, in Pompey had abolished the whole name of party, yet Caesar had not yet advanced to the stability of peace, while there remained, as a rock and knot and delay of the public security, Antonius.

9.2. Nor was he lacking to his vices, so as to perish; nay, having tried everything, by ambition and luxury he freed first his enemies, then the citizens, at last even his age, from terror.

9.3. The Parthians, by the Crassian disaster, had raised their spirits higher, and had gladly received the civil discords of the Roman people. And so, as soon as the first occasion shone, they did not hesitate to burst out, Labienus indeed inviting them of his own accord, who, sent by Cassius and Brutus—what frenzy of crimes—had solicited the enemy to their aid.

9.4. And they, under the leadership of Pacorus, a royal youth, had scattered the Antonian garrisons; the legate Saxa, lest he should come into their power, obtained his end with the sword.

9.5. In short, Syria being taken away, the evil was spreading more widely, the enemy conquering for themselves under the appearance of an auxiliary, had not Ventidius, this too a legate of Antonius, with incredible good fortune cut down both the forces of Labienus and Pacorus himself and the whole Parthian cavalry in the whole gulf between the Orontes and the Euphrates.

9.6. There were more than twenty thousand. Nor without the counsel of the leader, who, by feigned fear, suffered the enemy to come up to the camp so far that, the space of casting being consumed, he took away the use of their arrows.

9.7. The king, fighting most bravely, fell. Soon, his head being carried round through the cities that had revolted, Syria was recovered without war. So we balanced the Crassian disaster with the slaying of Pacorus.

10.1. The Parthians and Romans having tried each other in turn, when Crassus and Pacorus on either side had given proofs of their mutual strength, with equal reverence again friendship was renewed, and indeed a treaty was struck by Antonius himself with the king.

10.2. But—the immense vanity of the man—while through desire of titles he longs to have the Araxes and the Euphrates read of beneath his images, without cause or counsel and without even an imaginary declaration of war, as though this too were a part of a leader's art to come upon them unawares,

10.3. suddenly, Syria being left behind, he makes an onset upon the Parthians. The nation, crafty beyond its confidence in arms, feigns alarm and flight into the plains. And he at once, as though a victor, followed, when suddenly, no great band, out of the unexpected and now upon weary men along the way toward evening, like a cloud burst forth. With arrows hurled from every side they covered two

10.4. legions. Nothing had happened in comparison with the disaster which threatened on the next day, had not the pity of the gods intervened. One of the survivors of the Crassian disaster, in Parthian dress, rode up to the camp, and, giving a greeting in Latin, when by his very speech he had won confidence, taught what was impending;

10.5. that the king would soon be at hand with all his forces; that they should go back and make for the mountains: even so perhaps the enemy would not be lacking. And so a smaller force of the enemy than threatened followed;

10.6. yet it was at hand. The remaining forces would have been destroyed, had not, as the weapons pressed like hail, certain soldiers chanced, as though instructed, to fall upon their knees, and, raising their shields above their heads, given the appearance of the slain.

10.7. Then the Parthian held back his bow. Then again, when the Romans had risen up, the thing was so much a marvel that one of the barbarians uttered the cry, "Go and farewell, Romans! Deservedly the fame of the nations calls you victors, who have fled the weapons of the Parthians." Nor was the disaster received afterward from the road less than from the enemy.

10.8. The region was hostile first by thirst, then to some by waters more hostile than thirst-water; last of all, those waters which now by the weak and greedily were drunk, even the sweet ones, were noxious.

10.9. Soon both the heats through Armenia and the snows through Cappadocia and the sudden change of either climate was as a pestilence.

10.10. So, scarcely a third part of sixteen legions remaining, when his silver was here and there cut up with axes, and when amid the delays he had again and again demanded death of his own gladiator, that distinguished general at last fled into Syria, where, by a kind of incredible madness of mind, he became somewhat fiercer, as though he had conquered, because he had escaped.

11.1. The frenzy of Antonius, since through ambition it could not perish, was extinguished by luxury and lust. For when, after the Parthians, hating arms, he passed his time in idleness, captured by the love of Cleopatra, as though all had gone well, he refreshed himself in the royal lap.

11.2. Hence the Egyptian woman demanded of the drunken general, as the price of her favours, the Roman empire; and Antonius promised it, as though the Roman were easier than the Parthian.

11.3. So he began to prepare a tyranny not for himself, nor secretly, but, forgetful of his country, his name, his toga, his rods, he had fallen away wholly into that monster, in mind as in dress and equipment. A golden staff in his hand, a scimitar at his side, a purple robe fastened with vast gems: a diadem was lacking, that as king he too might enjoy a queen.

11.4. At the first report of the new disturbances Caesar had crossed from Brundisium, to meet the coming war, and, his camp being pitched in Epirus, he had girt the whole Actian shore, the island of Leucas and Mount Leucate and the horns of the Ambracian gulf, with a hostile fleet.

11.5. We had more than four hundred ships, the enemy less than two hundred; but their size made up for the number. For, from six to nine ranks of oars, and besides raised with towers and decks in the likeness of strongholds or cities, they were borne along not without the groaning of the sea and the labour of the winds;

11.6. which very mass was their undoing. Caesar's ships had grown from two banks of rowers to no more than six ranks; and so, handy for everything that need required, for taking onsets and recoils and turns, those heavy ones, hampered in everything, attacking them singly several at once with missiles, with the beaks at once, and besides with fire thrown, they scattered at their pleasure.

11.7. Nor did anything more show the greatness of the hostile forces than after the victory. For the wreckage of the immense fleet, made by the war, floated over the whole sea, and the spoils of the Arabs and Sabaeans and a thousand nations of Asia, smeared with purple and gold, the seas, ever stirred by the winds, threw back.

11.8. First the queen, leader of the flight, with her golden poop and purple sail, made for the deep. Soon Antonius followed, but Caesar pressed on their tracks.

11.9. And so neither did the flight prepared toward the Ocean, nor the two horns of Egypt fortified with garrisons, Paraetonium and Pelusium, avail to bring them forth: they were almost held by the hand. Antonius first seized the sword, the queen, prostrate at Caesar's feet, tried the eyes of the leader. In vain indeed: for her beauty was beneath the chastity of the chief.

11.10. Nor did she labour for the life which was offered, but for a part of the kingdom. When she despaired of this from the chief and saw herself reserved for the triumph, having got a less careful guard, she withdrew into the mausoleum (so they call the tombs of the kings). There, having put on her greatest

11.11. attire, as was her custom, in a coffin filled with perfumes she laid herself beside her Antonius, and, serpents being applied to her veins, she was dissolved by death as though by sleep.

12.1. This was the end of the civil wars: the rest were against foreign nations, which broke out in different parts of the world, while the empire was busied about its own troubles.

12.2. For the new peace, and the swollen and puffed-up necks of the nations not yet accustomed to the reins of servitude, recoiled from the yoke lately imposed.

12.3. The region turned toward the north was generally the fiercer in its dealings—the Norici, Illyrians, Pannonians, Dalmatians, Moesians, Thracians and Dacians, Sarmatians and Germans.

12.4. To the Norici the Alps gave spirit, as though war could not climb among the rocks and snows; but all the peoples of that quarter, the Breuni, the Ucenni, and the Vindelici, he subdued through his stepson Claudius Drusus.

12.5. What was the ferocity of the Alpine nations may easily be shown even through their women, who, their weapons failing, dashed their own infants on the ground and threw them in the faces of the soldiers.

12.6. The Illyrians too dwell beneath the Alps and guard their lowest valleys and certain barriers, as it were, entangled with steep torrents. Against these he himself undertook an expedition and ordered bridges to be made.

12.7. Here, both the waters and the enemy causing confusion, when the soldier hesitated to climb, he snatched a shield from his hand and was the first to enter upon the way. Then, the column following, when the bridge, undermined by the multitude, had given way, wounded in his hands and legs, more splendid for his blood and more august for the very danger, he cut down the rear of the enemy.

12.8. The Pannonians are walled in by two fierce rivers, the Drave and the Save. Having plundered their neighbours, they withdrew within their banks. To subdue these he sent Vinnius. They were cut down in both rivers.

12.9. The arms of the conquered were not, after the custom of war, burned, but broken and thrown into the running stream, that the name of Caesar might thus be announced to those who dwelt upon it.

12.10. The Dalmatians mostly dwelt beneath the woods; whence they were most ready for brigandage.

12.11. These Marcius the consul had long ago, as it were, beheaded by burning the city of Delminium, afterward Asinius Pollio had punished with the loss of their flocks, arms, and fields—this the second of orators—but Augustus entrusted them to Vibius to be thoroughly subdued, who forced that savage race to dig the earth and to purify the gold from the veins;

12.12. which otherwise that most stupid of nations seeks out with such zeal, such diligence, that they seem to dig it up for their own uses.

12.13. The Moesians, how wild, how savage they were, how barbarian even of barbarians, it is horrible to tell.

12.14. One of their leaders, before the line, silence being demanded, said, "Who are you?" The answer in turn was, "Romans, lords of nations." And he, "So shall it be," said, "if you conquer us." Marcus Crassus accepted the omen.

12.15. They at once, before the line, a horse being sacrificed, conceived a vow, that they would both make offering and feast upon the entrails of the slain leaders.

12.16. I could believe the gods heard it: they could not endure even the trumpets. No small terror did the centurion Cornidius strike into the barbarians, of a folly barbarian enough yet effective among such men, who, carrying a brazier upon his helmet, stirred by the motion of his body, poured forth a flame as from a burning head.

12.17. The Thracians had often before, but then especially under King Rhoemetalces, revolted. He had accustomed the barbarians both to military standards and to discipline, even to Roman arms; but, thoroughly subdued by Piso, they showed their frenzy in their very captivity. For, when they tried their chains with their teeth, they punished their own ferocity.

12.18. The Dacians cling to the mountains. Thence, by the command of King Cotiso, as often as the Danube, frozen with ice, had joined its banks, they were wont to run down and plunder the neighbourhood.

12.19. It seemed good to Caesar Augustus to drive off a nation most difficult of approach. So, Lentulus being sent, he drove them beyond the farther bank; on this side garrisons were placed. So Dacia then was not conquered, but removed and deferred.

12.20. The Sarmatians ride about in the open plains. And to keep these too from the Danube, through the same Lentulus, was enough. They have nothing but snows and frosts and woods. So great is their barbarism that they do not even understand peace.

12.21. Germany too—would that he had not thought it worth so much to conquer! It was lost more disgracefully than it was gloriously acquired.

12.22. But since he knew that his father Gaius Caesar had twice crossed the Rhine by a bridge and sought war, in his honour he had longed to make it a province; and it had been done, had the barbarians been able to bear our vices as well as our commands.

12.23. Drusus, sent into that province, first subdued the Usipetes, then overran the Tencteri and the Catti. For he adorned a certain raised mound, in the fashion of a trophy, with the spoils and insignia of the Marcomanni.

12.24. Then he attacked at once the most powerful nations, the Cherusci, the Suebi, and the Sicambri, who, having crucified twenty centurions, had taken up the war as though by this oath, with so sure a hope of victory that they divided the plunder beforehand by agreement. The Cherusci chose the horses,

12.25. the Suebi the gold and silver, the Sicambri the captives; but all turned out the reverse. For Drusus, victorious, divided and sold their horses, herds, torques, and themselves as plunder;

12.26. and besides, for the protection of the province, he disposed garrisons and watch-posts everywhere, along the river Meuse, along the Elbe, along the Weser. On the bank of the Rhine indeed he set up more than fifty forts. Borma and Gesoriacum he joined by bridges and secured with fleets.

12.27. The Hercynian forest, hated and inaccessible until that time, he opened up. In short, there was such peace in Germany that the men seemed changed, the land other, the very sky milder and softer than it was wont.

12.28. In short, not through flattery but from his deserts, that bravest of young men having died there, he himself, what never elsewhere, gave a surname from the province to the senate.

12.29. But it is harder to hold provinces than to make them;

12.30. by strength they are won, by justice retained. And so that joy was brief. For the Germans had been conquered rather than tamed, and under the general Drusus they admired our manners rather than our arms;

12.31. after he died, they began to hate the lust and pride of Quintilius Varus no less than his cruelty. He dared to hold an assize, and had issued an edict to the Catti, as though he could restrain the violence of barbarians by the rods of a lictor and the voice of a herald.

12.32. But they, who had long grieved that their swords were rusted over and their horses idle, as soon as they saw the togas and laws more savage than arms,

12.33. under the leadership of Arminius take up arms; while meanwhile Varus had such confidence in peace that he was not even moved by the conspiracy betrayed through Segestes, one of the chiefs.

12.34. And so, attacking him unawares, unprovided and fearing nothing of the kind, when he—O security—was summoning men to the tribunal, they invade from every side; the camp is seized,

12.35. three legions are overwhelmed. Varus followed both the fate and the spirit of Paulus on the same day as the Cannensian disaster.

12.36. Nothing was bloodier than that slaughter through the marshes and woods, nothing more intolerable than the insults of the barbarians, especially against the pleaders of causes.

12.37. The eyes of some they cut off, the hands of others; of one the mouth was sewn up, the tongue being first cut out, which the barbarian, holding in his hand, said at last, "Viper, you have ceased to hiss."

12.38. The body too of the consul himself, which the loyalty of the soldiers had hidden in the ground, was dug up. The standards and two eagles the barbarians still possess; the third the standard-bearer, before he came into the enemy's hands, tore off, and, carrying it hidden in the recesses of his belt, lay hidden thus in the bloody marsh. By this disaster it came about that the empire, which had not stopped on the shore of the Ocean, stopped on the bank of the river Rhine.

12.40. These things toward the north: beneath the south there was tumult rather than war. The Musulami and Gaetuli, dwellers by the Syrtes, he checked under the leadership of Cossus; whence that surname Gaeticus, wider than the victory itself.

12.41. The Marmaridae and Garamantes he gave to Quirinius to be subdued. He too could have returned Marmaricus, but was more modest in valuing his victory.

12.42. Toward the east there was more trouble with the Armenians. Thither he sent one of the Caesars, his grandsons. Both were short-lived by fate, but the one ingloriously. For at Massilia Lucius is released by disease, in Syria Gaius died of a wound, when he was recovering into his power Armenia as it was withdrawing itself to the Parthians.

12.43. The Armenians, King Tigranes being conquered, Pompey had accustomed to this one kind of servitude, that they should receive their governors from us. The right, then, interrupted, was through him recovered, not without blood,

12.44. nor yet with much fighting. For Dones, whom the king had set over Artageris, attacking by feigned betrayal the man intent upon a paper, which he himself had handed him as containing the accounts of the treasures, suddenly, with drawn steel, fell upon him. And then indeed Caesar was for the time recovered from his wound, but * * *. For the rest, the barbarian, overwhelmed on every side by the hostile army, by the sword and the pyre into which, struck, he threw himself, gave satisfaction to Caesar, even then surviving.

12.46. In the west almost all Spain was at peace, save that which, clinging to the rocks of the Pyrenees as it ends, the nearer Ocean washes. Here two most powerful nations, the Cantabri and the Astures, lived exempt from empire.

12.47. The spirit of the Cantabri was both the earlier and the fiercer and the more stubborn in rebelling, who, not content to defend their own liberty, tried also to lord it over their neighbours, and wearied the Vaccaei and the Turmogi and the Autrigones

12.48. with frequent incursions. Against these, then, because it was announced that they were acting too violently, an expedition was not entrusted but undertaken. He himself came to Segisama, pitched camp, then, his army in three parts embracing the whole of Cantabria, hemmed in the savage race, in the manner of beasts, as it were by a kind of net.

12.49. Nor was there rest from the Ocean, when even the rear of the enemy was cut down by a hostile fleet. First there was fighting against the Cantabri beneath the walls of Bergida. Thence at once flight into the loftiest Mount Vindius, whither they had believed that the seas of the Ocean would sooner climb than the arms of Rome.

12.50. Thirdly the town of Aracelium resisted with great force; yet it was taken. Last of all was the siege of Mount Medullius, which, encompassed by a continuous ditch of eighteen miles, the Roman approaching on every side at once, after the barbarians see the extremity, vying with one another by fire, by steel, amid their feasts, and by poison, which there is commonly pressed from the yew, anticipated death, and the greater part rescued themselves from a captivity which to those till then untamed seemed heavier than death.

12.51. These things Caesar, wintering in the maritime parts of Tarraco, received through his legates Antistius and Furnius and through Agrippa.

12.52. Soon he himself, being present, led some down from the mountains, bound others by hostages, sold others under the crown by the right of war.

12.53. The matter seemed to the senate worthy of a laurel, worthy of a triumphal car; but Caesar was now so great that he disdained to be increased by a triumph.

12.54. The Astures at that time had come down with a vast column from the snowy mountains. Nor did this onset seem rashly undertaken by the barbarians; but, their camp being pitched by the river Astura, their column being divided into three parts, they prepared to attack at once three camps of the Romans.

12.55. And the struggle would have been doubtful and bloody and—would it had been with mutual slaughter—with men so brave,

12.56. so sudden, so coming with counsel, had not the Brigaecini betrayed them, by whom, forewarned, Carisius came up with his army. To have overwhelmed their counsels was as good as a victory, yet even so the contest was not bloodless.

12.57. The remnants of the routed army the most powerful city Lancia received, where there was such a struggle over the place that, when torches were demanded for the captured city, the leader scarcely obtained pardon, that it should rather stand as a monument of the Roman victory than be burned.

12.59. This was the end of Augustus's warlike contests, and the same the end of Spain's rebelling. There followed soon a sure faith and an eternal peace, both from the temper of the people themselves, more ready for the arts of peace, and from the counsel of Caesar, who, fearing the confidence of the mountains into which they withdrew, ordered them to inhabit and dwell in his own camp,

12.60. because it was on the plain; there to hold the council of the nation, that to be observed as the capital. The nature of the region favoured the counsel; for round about it is all gold-bearing and rich in malachite and vermilion and other colours. And so he ordered the soil to be worked. So the Astures, striving in the deep for their own wealth and riches, while they seek them for others, began to know them.

12.61. All the nations to the west and south being pacified, to the north also, that is, within the Rhine and the Danube, and to the east within the Cyrus and the Euphrates, those too who remained exempt from empire yet felt the greatness and revered the Roman people, victor of nations.

12.62. For both the Scythians sent envoys and the Sarmatians seeking friendship. The Seres too and the Indians who dwell beneath the very sun, bringing elephants among their gifts with gems and pearls, charged nothing more than the length of the way—they had filled four years; and the very colour of the men confessed that they came from another sky.

12.63. The Parthians too, as though they repented of victory, of their own accord brought back the standards taken in the Crassian disaster.

12.64. So everywhere there was a sure and continual peace or compact of the whole human race, and at last Caesar Augustus dared, in the seven-hundredth year from the founding of the city, to close the double Janus, shut before him twice, under King Numa and when Carthage was first conquered.

12.65. Hence, turning to peace, he restrained with grave and severe laws an age prone to all vices and flowing into luxury; for which so many great deeds he was called perpetual imperator and father of his country.

12.66. It was debated too in the senate whether, because he had founded the empire, he should be called Romulus; but the name of Augustus seemed more holy and reverend, so that, even while he dwells on earth, by his very name and title he should be consecrated.