You and Cassius were obliged to fly out of Italy, and Cicero, who was unwilling to take the same part, could find no expedient to save himself and the Senate but the wretched one of supporting and raising very high another Caesar, the adopted son and heir of him you had slain, to oppose Antony and to divide the Caesarean party.  But even while he did this he perpetually offended that party and made them his enemies by harangues in the Senate, which breathed the very spirit of the old Pompeian faction, and made him appear to Octavius and all the friends of the dead Dictator no less guilty of his death than those who had killed him.  What could this end in but that which you and your friends had most to fear, a reunion of the whole Caesarean party and of their principal leaders, however discordant the one with the other, to destroy the Pompeians?  For my own part, I foresaw it long before the event, and therefore kept myself wholly clear of those proceedings.  You think I ought to have joined you and Cassius at Philippi, because I knew your good intentions, and that, if you succeeded, you designed to restore the commonwealth.  I am persuaded you did both agree in that point, but you differed in so many others, there was such a dissimilitude in your tempers and characters, that the union between you could not have lasted long, and your dissension would have had most fatal effects with regard both to the settlement and to the administration of the Republic.  Besides, the whole mass of it was in such a fermentation, and so corrupted, that I am convinced new disorders would soon have arisen.  If you had applied gentle remedies, to which your nature inclined, those remedies would have failed; if Cassius had induced you to act with severity, your government would have been stigmatised with the name of a tyranny more detestable than that against which you conspired, and Caesar’s clemency would have been the perpetual topic of every factious oration to the people, and of every seditious discourse to the soldiers.  Thus you would have soon been plunged in the miseries of another civil war, or perhaps assassinated in the Senate, as Julius was by you.  Nothing could give the Roman Empire a lasting tranquillity but such a prudent plan of a mitigated imperial power as was afterwards formed by Octavius, when he had ably and happily delivered himself from all opposition and partnership in the government.  Those quiet times I lived to see, and I must say they were the best I ever had seen, far better than those under the turbulent aristocracy for which you contended.  And let me boast a little of my own prudence, which, through so many storms, could steer me safe into that port.  Had it only given me safety, without reputation, I should not think that I ought to value myself upon it.  But in all these revolutions my honour remained as unimpaired as my fortune.  I so conducted myself that I lost no esteem in being Antony’s friend after having been Cicero’s, or in my alliance