What health would there be for the sick, if those indisposed should not obey their physicians in all points, or what safety for the navigators if the sailors should turn a deaf ear to their pilots?  It is by a natural law both necessary and salutary that the principle of ruling and again that of being ruled have been placed among men, and without them it is impossible for anything to continue to exist for ever so short a time.  Now it belongs to him who is stationed over another both to think out and to command the requisite course, and to him who is made subservient to obey without questioning and to put the order into action.  By this the sensible element is distinguished from the senseless and the understanding element from the ignorant in all matters.

[-34-] “Since these things are so I would never under compulsion assent to these brawlers nor give them my permission perforce.  Why am I sprung from Aeneas and Iulus, why have I been praetor, why consul, for what end have I led some of you out from home and gathered others later, for what end have I received and held the authority of a proconsul now for so long a time, if I am to be a slave to any one of you and conquered by any one of you here in Italy and near to Rome,—­I, to whom you owe your subjection of the Gauls and your conquest of Britain?  What should I fear or dread?  That some one of you will kill me?  Nay, but if you all had this mind, I would voluntarily choose to die rather than to give up the dignity of my position as leader or to abandon the attitude of mind befitting the head of an enterprise.  For a far greater danger than the unjust death of one man confronts the city, if the soldiers shall become accustomed to issue orders to their generals and to take the justice of the law into their own hands.[-35-] No one of them, however, has so much as made this threat:  if he had, I am sure he would have been slain forthwith by the rest of you.  But they are withdrawing from the campaign on the pretence of being wearied and are laying down their arms because (they say) they are worn out, and certainly if they do not obtain my consent to this wish of theirs, they will leave their ranks and go over to Pompey:  some of them make this perfectly evident.  Who would not be glad to be deprived of such men, and who would not pray that such soldiers might belong to his rival, seeing that they are not content with what is given and are not obedient to orders, but that simulating old age in the midst of youth and in strength simulating weakness they claim the right to lord it over their rulers and to tyrannize over their leaders?  I had ten thousand times rather be reconciled with Pompey on any terms whatever or suffer any other conceivable fate than do anything unworthy of my native thought or of my own deliberate policy.  Are you unaware that it is not sovereignty or gain that I desire and that I am not bent upon accomplishing anything absolutely, an at any cost, so that I would lie and flatter and fawn upon people to this end?  Will you give up, then, for these reasons the campaign, O what can I call you?  Yet still it shall be not as you yourselves desire and say but as is profitable for the commonwealth and for myself.”