Dream of Scipio and Stoic Paradoxes

Codianus
in?
Cicero
in?
this?
son?
of their?
Paradoxon
in?
this?

A small, hand-drawn face (doodle) appears in the left margin.

In a life which ought to be more moderate than any gesture, more fitting than any verse, will you say that you sinned in a single syllable? I do not listen to the poet in trifles; in the fellowship of life, I will listen to a citizen measuring his own sins with his fingers. If these seem shorter, how can they seem lighter, when whatever is sinned is sinned by the disturbance of reason and order? Moreover, with reason and order once disturbed, nothing can be added by which it might seem possible to sin more.

You say that fools are insane. But I, indeed, will condemn you not as a fool, as often, not as wicked, as always, but as demented and insane in necessary matters. The mind of the wise man, by the magnitude of its counsel, by the tolerance of human affairs, by the contempt of fortune, and finally by all virtues, as if fenced by walls, will be conquered and taken by storm, he who cannot even be driven from the state. For what state? Is every assembly even of wild and savage men, is every multitude of fugitives and robbers gathered into one place a state? You will certainly deny it. Therefore, that was not a state then when laws had no power in it, when judgments were lying low, when ancestral custom had perished, when, with magistrates driven out by the sword, the name of the senate did not exist in the republic, when that gathering of scoundrels and that robbery established in the forum under your leadership, and the remnants of the conspiracy turned from the furies of Catiline to your crime and madness, was not a state. Therefore, I was not driven from a state which did not exist. I was summoned into the state so that there might be a consul in the republic, who at that time had been none, and there might be a senate which at that time had perished, and there might be a census of a free people, and there might be law and equity, which are the bonds of a state. Having recalled memory, but see how I despised those weapons. The wicked injury cast and sent at me by you, I always endured. I never thought it had reached me. Unless perhaps when you were disturbing the walls, or when you were bringing wicked torches to the roofs, you thought some of mine were collapsing or burning.