My own self

My retirement¹ is cast in my teeth; and to this charge I cannot reply without highly exalting my own merits. For what, gentlemen, must I say? That consciousness of misdoing urged me into exile? But the charge that was laid at my door, so far from being a misdoing, was the grandest deed in the history of the human race!² That I dreaded prosecution before the people? But such a prosecution was never even contemplated, and had it taken place I should have emerged from it with my reputation doubly enhanced. Shall I then say that the patriotic party failed in my protection? It would be false. Or that I feared death? That would be cowardly. I must say, then, what I would not say save under compulsion - for any self-congratulary remarks I have ever uttered have been made rather to repel insinuations than to claim credit for myself - I say, then, and with all the emphasis I can use, that when, under the ledership of a tribune of the plebs and with the support of the consuls, with the senate humiliated, the Roman knighthood cowed, and the whole community agitated and distraught, the carefully stimulated lawnessness of desperadoes and conspirators was launching an asault not so much upon myself as upon all good patriots through me, I saw that, should I prove victorious, some frail vestiges of a republic would yet remain, but, should I be defeated, it would become utterly extinct. Having come to this conclusion, I was heart-broken at the prospect of separation from my unhappy wife, of the destitution of my beloved children, of the blow that would fall upon my excellent and affectionate brother who was far away, and of the unforeseen wreck of a family whose sense of security had been so complete; but all these possibilities came second in my thoughts to the lives of my fellow-citizens, and I thought it better that the state should falter through the retirement of one,³ than that it should fall through the destruction of all. I hoped, and my hopes have been realised, that if brave men yet survived, my humiliation might be retrieved; but if I should perish, and the patriotic party⁴ with me, I saw no prospect of a resurrection for the republic.