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With what effrontery, then, with what assurance, with what
impudence, with what folly, or rather insanity, do they refuse to
impute these disasters to their own gods, and impute the present to our
Christ! These bloody civil wars, more distressing, by the avowal of
their own historians, than any foreign wars, and which were pronounced
to be not merely calamitous, but absolutely ruinous to the republic,
began long before the coming of Christ, and gave birth to one
another; so that a concatenation of unjustifiable causes led from the
wars of Marius and Sylla to those of Sertorius and Cataline, of
whom the one was proscribed, the other brought up by Sylla; from this
to the war of Lepidus and Catulus, of whom the one wished to
rescind, the other to defend the acts of Sylla; from this to the war
of Pompey and Caesar, of whom Pompey had been a partisan of Sylla,
whose power he equalled or even surpassed, while Caesar condemned
Pompey's power because it was not his own, and yet exceeded it when
Pompey was defeated and slain. From him the chain of civil wars
extended to the second Caesar, afterwards called Augustus, and in
whose reign Christ was born. For even Augustus himself waged many
civil wars; and in these wars many of the foremost men perished, among
them that skilful manipulator of the republic, Cicero. Caius
[Julius] Caesar, when he had conquered Pompey, though he used his
victory with clemency, and granted to men of the opposite faction both
life and honors, was suspected of aiming at royalty, and was
assassinated in the curia by a party of noble senators, who had
conspired to defend the liberty of the republic. His power was then
coveted by Antony, a man of very different character, polluted and
debased by every kind of vice, who was strenuously resisted by Cicero
on the same plea of defending the liberty of the republic. At this
juncture that other Caesar, the adopted son of Caius, and
afterwards, as I said, known by the name of Augustus, had made his
d but as a young man of remarkable genius. This youthful Caesar was
favored by Cicero, in order that his influence might counteract that
of Antony; for he hoped that Caesar would overthrow and blast the
power of Antony, and establish a free state, so blind and unaware of
the future was he: for that very young man, whose advancement and
influence he was fostering, allowed Cicero to be killed as the seal of
an alliance with Antony, and subjected to his own rule the very
liberty of the republic in defence of which he had made so many
orations.
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