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 luxury and licence, and meanwhile he takes advantage of your indolence.

As to your conduct, I lack sufficient wisdom to know whether to call it cowardice, weakness or madness, when each one of you seems to pray that the evils which threaten you like a thunderbolt may not touch him, and yet makes not the slightest effort to prevent them.

I pray you consider how the order of things is inverted; formerly public mischief was planned secretly, public defence openly; and hence the good easily forestalled the wicked. Nowadays peace and harmony are disturbed openly, defended secretly; those who desire disorder are in arms; you are in fear. What are you waiting for, unless perchance you are ashamed or weary of well doing? Are you influenced by the demands of Lepidus? He says that he wishes to render unto each his own, and keeps the property of others; to annul laws established in time of war, while he uses armed compulsion; to establish the citizenship of those from whom he denies that it has been taken, and in the interests of peace to restore the power of the tribunes, from which all our discords were kindled.

O vilest and most shameless of all men, do you take to heart the poverty and grief of the citizens, when you have nothing in your possession which was not seized by arms or by injustice! You ask for a second consulship, as if you had ever given up your first. You seek harmony through war, by which the harmony which we had attained is broken, a traitor to us, unfaithful to your party, the enemy of all good citizens. Are you not ashamed either before