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41“I have spoken, Quirites, only of his greatest and most striking characteristics, and in a rather summary way; for if one wished to enumerate all his qualities minutely one by one, he would require many days. Furthermore, I know well that though you will have heard from me only these few facts, yet they will lead you to recall in your own minds all the rest, so that you will feel that I have in a manner related those also. 2For neither I, in what I have said about him, have been moved by a spirit of vain boasting, nor have you in listening; rather my purpose has been that his many noble achievements should gain the meed of everlasting glory in your souls. 3Yet how can one refrain from mentioning his senators? Without giving offence he removed from their number the scum that had come to the surface from the factions, and by this very act exalted the remainder, magnified it by increasing the property requirement, and enriched it by grants of money; he voted on an equality with his colleagues and with them took part in a division of the house; he always communicated to them all the greatest and most important matters, either in the senate chamber or else at his house, whither he summoned different members at different times because of his age and bodily infirmity. 4How can one refrain from mentioning the Roman people at large? For them he provided public works, largesses, games, festivals, amnesty, food in abundance, and safety, not only from the enemy and from evildoers, but even from the acts of Heaven, both those that befall by day and those also that befall by night. There are, again, the allies: for them he freed their liberty of its dangers and their alliance of its costs. There are the subject nations also: no one of them was ever treated with insolence or abuse. 5How could one forget to mention a man who in private life was poor, in public life rich; who with himself was frugal, but towards others lavish of his means; who always endured every toil and danger himself on your behalf, but would not inflict upon you the hardship of so much as escorting him when he left the city or of meeting him when he returned; who on holidays admitted even the populace to his house, but on other days greeted even the senate only in its chamber? 6How could one pass over the vast number of his laws and their precision? They contained for the wronged an all-sufficient consolation, and for the wrongdoers a not inhuman punishment. Or his rewards offered to those who married and had children? Or the prizes given to the soldiers without injury to anyone else? 7Or, again, shall I not tell how satisfied he was with our possessions acquired once for all under the compulsion of necessity, but refused to subjugate additional territory, the acquisition of which might, while seeming to give us a wider sway, have entailed the loss of even what we had? Or how he always shared the joys and sorrows, the jests and earnestness of his intimate friends, 8and allowed all, in a word, who could make any useful suggestion to speak their minds freely? Or how he praised those who spoke the truth, but hated flatterers? Or how he bestowed upon many people large sums from his own means, and how, when anything was bequeathed to him by men who had children, he restored it all to the children? Could a speaker’s forgetfulness cause all these things to be blotted out?
9“It was for all this, therefore, that you, with good reason, made him your leader and a father of the people, that you honoured him with many marks of esteem and with ever so many consulships, and that you finally made him a demigod and declared him to be immortal. Hence it is fitting also that we should not mourn for him, but that, while we now at last give his body back to Nature, we should glorify his spirit, as that of a god, for ever.”
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