will have the face to endeavour to retain it, when its most illustrious owner is restored to his country?  Will not that man restore his plunder, who enfolding the patrimony of his master in his embrace, clinging to the treasure like a dragon, the slave of Pompeius, the freedman of Caesar, has seized upon his estates in the Lucanian district?  And as for those seven hundred millions of sesterces which you, O conscript fathers, promised to the young man, they will be recovered in such a manner that the son of Cnaeus Pompeius will appear to have been established by you in his patrimony.  This is what the senate must do; the Roman people will do the rest with respect to that family which was at one time one of the most honourable it ever saw.  In the first place, it will invest him with his father’s honour as an augur, for which rank I will nominate him and promote his election, in order that I may restore to the son what I received from the father.  Which of these men will the Roman people most willingly sanction as the augur of the all-powerful and all-great Jupiter, whose interpreters and messengers we have been appointed,—­Pompeius or Antonius?  It seems indeed, to me, that Fortune has managed this by the divine aid of the immortal gods, that, leaving the acts of Caesar firmly ratified, the son of Cnaeus Pompeius might still be able to recover the dignities and fortunes of his father.

Vi.  And I think, O conscript fathers, that we ought not to pass over that fact either in silence,—­that those illustrious men who are acting as ambassadors, Lucius Paullus, Quintus Thermus, and Caius Fannius, whose inclinations towards the republic you are thoroughly acquainted with, and also with the constancy and firmness of that favourable inclination, report that they turned aside to Marseilles for the purpose of conferring with Pompeius, and that they found him in a disposition very much inclined to go with his troops to Mutina, if he had not been afraid of offending the minds of the veterans.  But he is a true son of that father who did quite as many things wisely as he did bravely.  Therefore you perceive that his courage was quite ready, and that prudence was not wanting to him.

And this, too, is what Marcus Lepidus ought to take care of,—­not to appear to act in any respect with more arrogance than suits his character.  For if he alarms us with his army, he is forgetting that that army belongs to the senate, and to the Roman people, and to the whole republic, not to himself.  “But he has the power to use it as if it were his own.”  What then?  Does it become virtuous men to do everything which it is in their power to do?  Suppose it be a base thing?  Suppose it be a mischievous thing?  Suppose it be absolutely unlawful to do it?