[-33-] “This is the first and most important point I have to mention.  Second arises the consideration, that when consuls and praetors and those serving in their place can take offices and leaderships in a way prescribed by the laws it is neither decent nor advantageous for you to overlook them and introduce some new office.  To what end do you elect the annual officials, if you are going to make no use of them for such businesses?  Not, presumably, that they may stalk about in purple-bordered togas, nor that endued with the name alone of the office they may be deprived of its duties.  How can you fail to alienate these and all the rest who have a purpose to enter politics at all, if you break down the ancient offices, and entrust nothing to those elected by law, but assign a strange and previously non-existent position of command to a private individual? [-34-] If there should be any necessity of choosing, in addition to the annual officials, still another, there is for this, too, an ancient precedent,—­I mean the dictator.  However, because he held such power, our fathers did not appoint him on all occasions nor for a longer period than six months.  Accordingly, if you need any such person, you may, without transgressing the laws or making light of the common welfare, designate either Pompey or any one else dictator,—­on condition that he shall sway for not more than the time ordained, nor outside of Italy.  You doubtless are not ignorant that this latter limitation, too, our fathers guarded scrupulously, and no instance would be found of a dictator chosen for any other country, except one sent to Sicily, and that without accomplishing anything.  But if Italy needs no such person and you would no longer endure, apart from the functions of dictator, even the name (this is clear from your anger against Sulla), how would it be right for a new position of command to be created, and that, too, for three years and embracing practically all interests both in Italy and without?  What disasters come to cities from such a course, and how many men on account of lawless lust for rule have often disturbed our populace and done themselves countless evils, you all alike understand.

[-35-] “About this, then, I shall say no more.  Who can fail to know that on general principles it is neither decent nor advantageous to commit matters to any one man, or for any one man to be put in charge of all the blessings we own, even if he be the best man conceivable?  Great honors and excessive powers excite and ruin even such persons.  I ask you, however, to consider my next assertion,—­that it is not possible for one man to preside over the entire sea and to manage the entire war properly.  You must, if you shall in the least do what is needful, make war on them everywhere at once, so that they may neither unite, nor by finding a refuge among those not attacked, become hard to capture.  Any one man who might be in command could by no manner of means accomplish this.  For how on about the same days