reject it before I have fully explained what it
is;--I, who, I will say so over and over again, have always been a
panegyrist, have always been an adviser of peace, do not wish to have
peace with Marcus Antonius. I approach the rest of my speech with
great hope, O conscript fathers, since I have now passed by that
perilous point amid your silence.

Why then do I not wish for peace? Because it would be shameful;
because it would be dangerous; because it cannot possibly be real. And
while I explain these three points to you, I beg of you, O conscript
fathers, to listen to my words with the same kindness which you
usually show to me.

What is more shameful than inconsistency, fickleness, and levity, both
to individuals, and also to the entire senate? Moreover, what can be
more inconsistent than on a sudden to be willing to be united in peace
with a man whom you have lately adjudged to be an enemy, not by words,
but by actions and by many formal decrees? Unless, indeed, when you
were decreeing honours to Caius Caesar, well-deserved indeed by and
fairly due to him, but still unprecedented and never to be forgotten,
for one single reason,--because he had levied an army against Marcus
Antonius,--you were not judging Marcus Antonius to be an enemy; and
unless Antonius was not pronounced an enemy by you, when the veteran
soldiers were praised by your authority, for having followed Caesar;
and unless you did not declare Antonius an enemy when you promised
exemptions and money and lands to those brave legions, because they
had deserted him who was consul while he was an enemy.

IV. What? when you distinguished with the highest praises Brutus, a
man born under some omen, as it were, of his race and name, for the
deliverance of the republic, and his army, which was waging war
against Antonius on behalf of the liberty of the Roman people, and the
most loyal and admirable province of Gaul, did you not then pronounce
Antonius an enemy? What? when you decreed that the consuls, one or
both of them, should go to the war, what war was there if Antonius was
not an enemy? Why then was it that most gallant man, my own colleague
and intimate friend, Aulus Hirtius the consul, has set out? And in
what delicate health he is; how wasted away! But the weak state of his
body could not repress the vigour of his mind. He thought it fair, I
suppose, to expose to danger in defence of the Roman people that life
which had been preserved to him by their