Page:Cicero And The Fall Of The Roman Republic.djvu/408

360 life, which is hemmed in by the bounds of body and of breath? Your life is there, there, I say, where it will be fresh in the memory of all ages, where posterity will cherish it, where eternity itself will claim it for its own. It is the approval of that time to come which you must court, to its good-will you must commend yourself. It has much already to wonder at in you, now it asks for something to praise. Future generations will listen awe-struck, doubtless, as they hear or read the tale of all your conflicts and all your triumphs. But unless you have so designed and framed the constitution as to set this city on a sure foundation, your name, though it may go forth into all lands, will find no abiding resting-place. Among those who are yet to be born there will be controversy, as there has been amongst ourselves; some will extol your deeds, others perchance will find something wanting, and ttiat the one thing needful, unless you quench the coal of civil war, by giving life to our State, so that men may ascribe the first to the inexorableness of destiny, the second to the providence of your design. Labour, then, as beneath the eye of that tribunal which will give its sentence concerning you many ages hence, a sentence perhaps more disinterested than any which we can pass to-day; for posterity will pronounce, undisturbed by favour or hope of advantage, undisturbed, likewise, by passion or by jealousy."

When Cicero uttered these words it is clear that the question "is there to be any sort of Free State?" had not yet received a definite answer in the