[-34-] Responsibility for these evils rested on the senators themselves.
For whereas they ought to have set at their head some one man of superior
judgment and to have coöperated with him continuously, they failed to do
this, but made protégés of a few whom they strengthened against the
rest, and later undertook to overthrow these favorites as well, and
consequently they found no one a friend but all hostile. The comparative
attitude of men toward those who have injured them and toward their
benefactors is different, for they remember a grudge even against their
wills but willingly forget to be thankful. This is partly because they
disdain to appear to have been kindly treated by any persons, since
they will seem to be the weaker of the two, and partly because they are
irritated at the idea that they will be thought to have been injured by
anybody with impunity, since that will imply cowardice on their part.
So those senators by not taking up with some one person, but attaching
themselves to one and another in turn, and voting and doing now something
for them, now something against them, suffered much because of them
and much also at their hands. All the leaders had one purpose in the
war,--the abolition of the popular power and the setting up of a
sovereignty. Some were fighting to see whose slaves they should be, and
others to see who should be their master; and so both of them equally
wrought havoc, and each of them won glory according to fortune, which
varied. The successful warriors were deemed shrewd and patriotic, and the
defeated ones were called both enemies of their country and pestilential
fellows.

[-35-] This was the state that the Roman affairs had at that time
reached: I shall now go on to describe the separate events. There seems
to me to be a very large amount of self-instruction possible, when one
takes facts as the basis of his reasoning, investigates the nature of
the former by the latter, and then proves his reasoning true by its