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21What would he have done now if he had laid hold of the power afforded by arms, seeing that he accomplished so much mischief by his words alone? These are your brilliant achievements, these are your great exhibitions of generalship; and not only were you condemned for them by your associates, but you also cast your own vote against yourself by fleeing even before your trial came on. 2Yet what greater proof could there be that you were guilty of his blood than that you came within an ace of perishing at the hands of those very persons on whose behalf you pretended you had done all this, that you were afraid of the very men whom you claimed to have benefited by these acts, and that you did not wait to hear what they had to say or to say a word to them, you clever, you extraordinary man, you who can aid others, but had to secure your own safety by flight as from a battle? 3And you are so shameless that you undertook to write a history of these events, disgraceful as they are, whereas you ought to have prayed that no one else should so much as record them, in order that you might derive at least this advantage, that your deeds should die with you and no memory of them be handed down to posterity. 4And to give you, sirs, something to make you even laugh, I beg you listen to a piece of his cleverness. He set himself the task of writing a history of all the achievements of the city (for he pretends to be a rhetorician and poet and philosopher and orator and historian), and then began, not with its founding, like the other historians of Rome, but with his own consulship, so that he might proceed backwards, making that the beginning of his account and the reign of Romulus the end.
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