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13“Reflecting upon these considerations and the others which I mentioned a little while ago, be prudent while you may and duly place in the hands of the people the army, the provinces, the offices, and the public funds. If you do it at once and voluntarily, you will be the most famous of men and the most secure; but if you wait for some compulsion to be brought to bear upon you, you will very likely suffer some disaster and gain infamy besides. 2Consider the testimony of history: Marius and Sulla and Metellus, and Pompey at first, when they got control of affairs, not only refused to assume sovereign power but also escaped disaster thereby; whereas Cinna and Strabo, the younger Marius and Sertorius, and Pompey himself at a later time, conceived a desire for sovereign power and perished miserably. 3For it is a difficult matter to induce this city, which has enjoyed a democratic government for so many years and holds empire over so many people, to consent to become a slave to any one. You have heard how the people banished Camillus just because he used white horses for his triumph; 4you have heard how they deposed Scipio from power, first condemning him for some act of arrogance; and you remember how they proceeded against your father just because they conceived a suspicion that he desired to be sole ruler. Yet there have never been any better men than these.
5“Nevertheless, I do not advise you merely to relinquish the sovereignty, but first to take all the measures which the public interest demands and by decrees and laws to settle definitively all important business, just as Sulla did, you recall; for even if some of his ordinances were subsequently overthrown, yet the majority of them and the more important still remain. 6And do not say that even then some men will indulge in factional quarrels, and thus require me, on my part, to say once more that the Romans would be much more apt to refuse to submit to the rule of a monarch. For if we should undertake to provide against all possible contingencies, it would be utterly absurd for us to be more afraid of the dissensions which are but incidental to democracy than of the tyrannies which are the natural outgrowth of monarchy. 7Regarding the terrible nature of such tyrannies I have not so much as attempted to say anything; for it has not been my wish idly to inveigh against a thing that so readily admits of condemnation, but rather to show you that monarchy is so constituted by nature that not even the men of high character . . .
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