[-34-] Responsibility for these evils rested on the senators themselves.  For whereas they ought to have set at their head some one man of superior judgment and to have cooeperated with him continuously, they failed to do this, but made proteges of a few whom they strengthened against the rest, and later undertook to overthrow these favorites as well, and consequently they found no one a friend but all hostile.  The comparative attitude of men toward those who have injured them and toward their benefactors is different, for they remember a grudge even against their wills but willingly forget to be thankful.  This is partly because they disdain to appear to have been kindly treated by any persons, since they will seem to be the weaker of the two, and partly because they are irritated at the idea that they will be thought to have been injured by anybody with impunity, since that will imply cowardice on their part.  So those senators by not taking up with some one person, but attaching themselves to one and another in turn, and voting and doing now something for them, now something against them, suffered much because of them and much also at their hands.  All the leaders had one purpose in the war,—­the abolition of the popular power and the setting up of a sovereignty.  Some were fighting to see whose slaves they should be, and others to see who should be their master; and so both of them equally wrought havoc, and each of them won glory according to fortune, which varied.  The successful warriors were deemed shrewd and patriotic, and the defeated ones were called both enemies of their country and pestilential fellows.

[-35-] This was the state that the Roman affairs had at that time reached:  I shall now go on to describe the separate events.  There seems to me to be a very large amount of self-instruction possible, when one takes facts as the basis of his reasoning, investigates the nature of the former by the latter, and then proves his reasoning true by its correspondence with the facts.

The precise reason for Antony’s besieging Decimus in Mutina was that the latter would not give up Gaul to him, but he pretended that it was because Decimus had been one of Caesar’s assassins.  For since the true cause of the war brought him no credit, and at the same time he saw the popular party flocking to Caesar to avenge his father, he put forward this excuse for the conflict.  That it was a mere pretext for getting control of Gaul he himself made plain in demanding that Cassius and Marcus Brutus be appointed consuls.  Each of these two utterances, of the most opposite character as they were, he made with an eye to his own advantage.  Caesar had begun a campaign against his rival before the war was granted him by the vote, but had done nothing worthy of importance.  When he learned of the decrees passed he accepted the honors and was glad, especially because when he was sacrificing at the time of receiving the distinction and authority of praetor the livers of all the victims,