Salvete, patres subscripti.
This email contains the first half of Cicero’s fourteenth Philippic oration. As W.C.A. Ker notes in the footnotes to his translation: ‘So ends the last spoken word of C[icero] that has come down to us.’ The Fourteenth Philippic is the final extant Philippic (fragments survive of others), and Cicero’s last extant oration.
As always, I’ve chosen to include these orations in e-pistulae for several reasons: they provide political context for most of the rest of Cicero’s letters; they are Cicero’s other ‘serialised’ work from this period; the Second Philippic was published and circulated like a letter rather than being delivered; the Thirteenth Philippic is effectively a letter delivered as a speech.
The translation is by W.C.A. Ker, taken from Attalus, with a few minor edits, and the footnotes (marked ‘**’) link to Ker’s footnotes on Attalus. There is a link at the end of this email to read the rest of the speech, as well as the Latin text.
For context: On April 14th Antony almost defeated Pansa—and then spectacularly lost to Hirtius—in a battle at Forum Gallorum, near where he was still besieging Decimus Brutus at Mutina. Around April 18-19th there had been rumours that Antony had been victorious, but on April 20th news of his defeat at Forum Gallorum reached Rome. Cicero was congratulated by the people of Rome and everybody clapped.
On April 21st, the Senate met to hear the reports of the battle from the three commanders—Pansa, Hirtius, and Octavian. The consular Publius Servilius Isauricus proposed a public thanksgiving. Cicero proposed that Pansa, Hirtius, and Octavian should all be granted the title imperator, and that Antony and his followers should be declared public enemies. The Senate passed all three motions.
If, as from the letter which has been read, conscript fathers, I have learned that the army of our accursed enemies has been cut to pieces and dispersed, I had also learned what we all of us especially long for, and think has followed from the victory which has been achieved, namely, that Decimus Brutus has already come out of Mutina, then, as on account of his danger we had assumed military garb, so on account of his safety I should without any doubt propose that we should return to our ancient dress. But before the event which the community most eagerly waits for has been reported, it is sufficient to indulge delight for a most important and glorious battle; but reserve the return to the garb of peace for the completion of victory. But the completion of this war is the safety of Decimus Brutus.
But what does the proposal mean that our dress should be changed for to-day, and that to-morrow we should go forth in military garb? Nay, when we once return to the dress we desire and long for, let us see to it that we keep it for evermore. For it is not only disgraceful, but not even pleasing to the immortal Gods themselves, that we should depart from their altars, which we approached in the civic gown, to assume the garb of war. And I remark, conscript fathers, that certain Senators favour this proposal, their wish and design being this: as they see that the day will be a very glorious one to Decimus Brutus on which, on account of his safety, we shall return to civic dress, they desire to rob him of this honour that it may not be handed down to posterity that on account of a single citizen's peril the Roman people assumed military garb, and on account of his safety returned to the civic gown. Take away this reason, and you will find none for so perverse a proposal. But do you, conscript fathers, preserve your authority, abide by your determination; keep in your memories, as you have often made plain, that the issue of all this war centres in the life of a single most valiant and eminent man.
For the relief of Decimus Brutus were sent as envoys the chief men of the community, to warn that enemy and murderer to depart from Mutina; for the preservation of the same Decimus Brutus a consul chosen by lot has set out to war, Aulus Hirtius, whose weakness of health his strength of spirit and the hope of victory have re-established; Caesar, when he had raised an army by his own efforts, and had freed the Republic from the first outbreak of danger, in order that no such crime should afterwards arise, has set out to relieve the same Brutus, and has overcome some pain on private grounds ** by his love of his country. What was Caius Pansa's object in holding levies, raising money, proposing the sternest decrees of the Senate against Antonius, encouraging us, and calling the Roman people to the cause of liberty, but the relief of Decimus Brutus? From him the Roman people in full assembly so earnestly demanded with one voice the safety of Decimus Brutus that they set that not merely before their own advantage, but even before the necessity of daily food. This object we, conscript fathers, ought to hope is on the eve of fulfilment, or fulfilled already; but it is fitting that the fruition of our hope be reserved for the actual event, lest we seem, either by our haste to have anticipated the kindness of the immortal Gods, or by our folly to have despised the might of Fortune.
But since your manner sufficiently declares your feeling on this matter, I will come to the letter that has arrived from the consuls and the propraetor, ** if I may first say a few words which are pertinent to the actual letter.
The swords of our legions and our armies have been dipped, conscript fathers, or rather steeped, in the blood shed in the two battles of our consuls, and in the third one of Caesar. If that blood was the blood of enemies, the devotion of our soldiers was supreme, a monstrous crime if it was of citizens, How long then shall he who has surpassed all enemies in crime be without the name of enemy? or do you wish the very weapons of your soldiers to waver in doubt whether they should be plunged into a citizen or into an enemy? You decree a thanksgiving; an enemy you do not call him. Truly welcome will be our thanks, welcome our victims, to the immortal Gods when there has been slain a multitude of citizens! ** ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘for the victory over unprincipled and audacious men’; for that is the name the most illustrious Senator ** gives them. Such adjectives belong to urban law-suits, they are not the marks that brand internecine war. They are forging wills, I imagine, or are ejecting their neighbours, or cheating striplings; for it is men affected with these vices and such like whom it is customary to call ‘bad’ or ‘audacious.’
The one most savage of all brigands is carrying on an inexpiable war against four consuls; ** he is waging the same war against the Senate and the Roman people; all men - though the evil he works is to his own ruin - he threatens with destruction, devastation, tortures, and racks; Dolabella's brutal and savage deed, one that no barbarous people could acknowledge, he testifies was committed by his advice; and what he would have attempted in this city, had not this our Jupiter himself repelled him from this temple and our walls, he has shown in the calamity he brought upon the citizens of Parma. There most excellent and honest men, bound by the closest ties to maintain the authority of this order and the dignity of the Roman people, were put to death in the most cruel ways by that vile wretch and monster Lucius Antonius, that mark for the hatred of all men, or - if the Gods too hate those they should hate - of the Gods as well. My mind recoils, conscript fathers, and dreads to utter what Lucius Antonius did to the children and wives of the men of Parma. For the infamies to which the Antonii willingly submitted ** to their own disgrace, they rejoice to have inflicted by violence on others. But the violence they offered them is disastrous: shameful the lust with which the life of the Antonii is stained. Is there then any man not bold enough to call these men enemies, by whose crimes he admits the cruelty of the Carthaginians has been surpassed?
For in what city, when he had captured it, was Hannibal as savage as Antonius has been in Parma, which he had seized by stealth? ** unless perhaps he is not to be regarded as an enemy of this colony, and of the rest towards which he is of the same mind! But if he is without any doubt the enemy of the colonies and boroughs, what think you is he towards this city which he has lusted for to glut the indigence of his brigandage, the city which that skilled and cunning surveyor Saxa had already apportioned by his ten-foot rule? ** Recall, in Heaven's name, conscript fathers, what our fears have been these two days past ** from most unscrupulous rumours spread by domestic enemies. Who without tears could look on his children, his wife, his home, his roof, his familiar Household Gods? All were thinking either of a most shameful death or of a most wretched flight. Do we hesitate to call enemies the authors of these fears? If any suggest a harsher name, I will gladly assent to it; with the usual word I am scarcely content; a milder one I will not use.
Accordingly, since we are bound, from the letter which has been read, to decree thanksgivings most justly due, and since Servilius has proposed them, I will in all increase the number of days, especially as they are to be decreed in honour, not of one, but of three generals. But my first task shall be to call them imperators ** by whose valour, judgement and good fortune we have been rescued from the utmost perils of slavery and death. For to whom these twenty years has a thanksgiving been decreed without his being called imperator, though his exploits may have been very small or sometimes none at all? Wherefore a thanksgiving should either not have been proposed by the previous speaker, or the customary and recognised honour should be awarded to those to whom even new and special ones are due.
If anyone had killed a thousand or two thousand Spaniards, or Gauls, or Thracians, the Senate would style him imperator according to this custom which has prevailed; now, when so many legions have been slain, such a multitude of enemies killed - enemies do I say? yes, I repeat, enemies, however much those domestic enemies of ours dislike this name - shall we award the honour of a thanksgiving to most illustrious generals and yet deprive them of the name of imperator? For with what honour, amid what joy and congratulation, ought those actual liberators of this city to enter this temple, when yesterday, on account of their exploits, the Roman people carried me from my house to the Capitol in ovation, ** and all but in triumph, and thence brought me back home? For that, and that only, is in my opinion a true and genuine triumph when, to those that have deserved well of the Republic, testimony is borne by the unanimous voice of the community. For if, amid a general rejoicing of the Roman people, they were congratulating one man, it is a great certificate of merit; if they returned thanks to one man, it is so much a greater; if they did both, no more magnificent testimonial can be imagined.
‘Are you then speaking of your own self?’ someone may say. Indeed, I do so unwillingly, but the pain caused by a sense of wrong ** has made me boastful beyond my habit. Is it not enough that by men without knowledge of virtue thanks to those who have well served the Republic are refused? shall envy search for a charge of rashness against those also who devote all their care to the safety of the Republic? For you know that during the last few days there has been a widely spread rumour that at the Parilia - that is, to-day - I proposed to come down into the forum with the fasces. ** I should imagine this tale was concocted against some gladiator, or brigand, or Catiline, not against the man who ensured that no such thing could ever be possible in the Republic. Is it to be believed that I who, when Catiline had this design, removed him, overthrew him, crushed him, should myself suddenly prove a Catiline? Under what auspices should I, an augur, receive those fasces? how long should I possess them? to whom should I transmit them? To think there was any man so wicked as to invent this, so insane as to believe it! Whence then came that suspicion, or rather whence sprang that rumour?
When, as you know, within the last three or four days a depressing report from Mutina was prevalent, disloyal citizens, puffed up with joy and insolence, gathered into one place, into that meeting-place of the Senate which proved unpropitious to their own frenzy rather than to the Republic. ** There, as they were planning our massacre, and were dividing the tasks among themselves, who should seize the Capitol, who the rostra, who the city-gates, they thought the citizens would flock around me. And that this fact should result in my unpopularity, and even in peril to my life, they spread abroad that report about the fasces; they proposed to bring the fasces to me with their own hands, When this had been done, as it were, with my consent, then an attack on me, as against a tyrant, by hired bravoes was organised; after which a massacre of you all would have followed. This plot the event, conscript fathers, has laid bare; but in proper time the fountain-head ** of all this wickedness shall be disclosed.
And so Publius Apuleius, the tribune of the plebs, the witness, confidant, and helper ever since my consulship in all my counsels and perils, could not bear the grief caused by my grief; he held a very great public meeting of the Roman people whose sentiments were identical with his. At that meeting, while he was proceeding, in accordance with our close connexion and intimacy, to free me from the suspicion concerning the fasces, the whole meeting with one voice declared that no thought of mine on public affairs was other than entirely loyal. After the holding of this meeting, within two or three hours there arrived the messengers and letters with the news we had most longed for; so that the same day not only freed me from a most unjust odium, but also distinguished me by the collective congratulations of the Roman people.
I have interposed these remarks, conscript fathers, not so much as an apology for myself - for I should be in a poor way if I were insufficiently exculpated in your eyes without a defence - as that I might advise, as I have always done, certain persons of too puny and narrow a spirit to regard the virtue of excellent citizens as worthy of imitation, not of envy. Great is the field open in the Republic, as Crassus used wisely to say; many are they for whom the path to fame is open.
I would indeed those chiefs of the Republic were alive who after my consulship, though I myself gave way to them, saw me not unwillingly in the chief place! But at this time, in so great a dearth of resolute and brave consulars, with what grief do you suppose I am filled, when I see some disaffected, others utterly careless, others with small resolution to abide by the cause they have undertaken, and regulating their opinions not always by the advantage of the Republic, but now by hope, and now by apprehension? But if anyone is anxious to compete for leadership - and there should be no such competition - he acts most foolishly if he compete with virtue by means of vice; for, as speed is overcome by speed, so in brave men virtue is overcome by virtue. Will you, if my feelings towards the Republic are most loyal, in order to overcome me, yourself entertain feelings the most treasonable? or, if you see that good men flock to me, will you invite to your side the reprobate? Not so should I wish it, first for the sake of the Republic, in the next place also of your honour. But if leadership were at issue, a thing I have never sought, what, pray, could I desire more? for by evil votes I cannot be overcome, by good perhaps I might be, and willingly.
That the Roman people sees this, remarks it, and judges of it certain persons are annoyed. Could it be that men should not judge of each man according to each man's deserts? For as of the Senate as a whole the Roman people most truly judges that at no period of the Republic has this order been more firm or more courageous, so concerning each of us, and most of all us who on this bench express our opinions, all men enquire, and long to hear what each man's opinion was, and thus they think of each one according to their view of his deserts. They keep it in mind that I on the twentieth of December ** was the chief instrument in the recovery of our liberty; that I since the Kalends of January ** to this hour have watched over the Republic; that my house and my ears have been open day and night to the advice and warnings of all men; that by my letters, my messengers, and my encouragements, all men, wherever they might be, have been stirred up to guard their country; that never by votes of mine since the Kalends of January have envoys been sent to Antonius; that I have always called him an enemy, always this a war; so that I, who on every occasion had been the adviser of genuine peace, was hostile to this name of a pestilent ‘peace.’ Have not I too always regarded Publius Ventidius as an enemy when others wished for him as tribune? ** Had the consuls been willing to allow these proposals of mine to go to a division, by the very authority of the Senate the weapons of all those brigands would long since have fallen from their hands.
Latin text of the Fourteenth Philippic | Glossary | Historia Civilis video overview of 44-43 BCE