frequency followed one another before the advent of Christ._
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 Catiline, 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 Cæsar, of whom Pompey had been a partisan of Sylla, whose power
he equalled or even surpassed, while Cæsar 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 Cæsar, 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] Cæsar, when he
had conquered Pompey, though he used his victory with clemency, and
granted to men of the opposite faction both life and honours, 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 Cæsar,
the adopted son of Caius, and afterwards, as I said, known by the
name of Augustus, had made his _début_ as a young man of remarkable
genius. This youthful Cæsar was favoured by Cicero, in order that his
influence might counteract that of Antony; for he hoped that Cæsar
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.