If, O conscript fathers, I return you thanks in a very inadequate
 manner for your kindness to me, and to my brother, and to my children, (which shall never be
 forgotten by us,) I beg and entreat you not to attribute it so much to any coldness of my
 disposition, as to the magnitude of the service which you have done me. For what fertility of
 genius, what copiousness of eloquence can be so great, what language can be found of such
 divine and extraordinary power, as to enable any one, I will not say to do due honour to the
 universal kindness of you all towards us, but even to count up and enumerate all the separate
 acts of kindness which we have received from you? You have restored to me my brother; whom I
 have wished for above all things; you have restored me to my most affectionate brother; you
 have restored us parents to our children, and our children to us; you have restored to us our
 dignity, our rank, our fortunes, the republic, which we reverence above all things, and our
 country, than which nothing can be dearer to us; you have restored us, in short, to ourselves.
 And if we ought to consider our parents most dear to us, because by
 them our life, our property, our freedom, and our rights as citizens have been given to us; if
 we love the immortal gods, by whose kindness we have preserved all those things, and have also
 had other benefits added to them; if we are most deeply attached to the Roman people owing to
 the honours paid to us by whom we have been placed in this most noble council, and in the very
 highest rank and dignity and in this citadel of the whole earth, if we are devoted to this
 order of the senate by which we have been frequently distinguished by most honourable decrees
 in our favour, surely it is a boundless and infinite obligation which we are under to you,
 who, by your singular zeal and unanimity an my behalf, have combined at one time the benefits
 done us by our parents, the bounty of the immortal gods, the honours conferred on us by the
 Roman people, and your own frequent decisions in my case; in such a manner that, owing, as we
 do, much to you, and great gratitude to the Roman people, and innumerable thanks to our
 parents, and everything to the immortal gods, the honours and enjoyments which we had
 separately before by their instrumentality, we have now recovered all together by your
 kindness. Therefore, O conscript fathers, we seem by your agency to have
 obtained a species of immortality, a thing too great to be even wished for by men. For what
 time will there ever be in which the memory and fame of your kindnesses to me will perish? The
 memory of your kindness, who, at the very time that you were besieged by violence and arms and
 terror and threats, not long after my departure all agreed in recalling me, at the motion of
 Lucius Ninnius, a most fearless and virtuous man, the most faithful and (if it had come to a
 battle) the least timid defender of my safety that that fatal year could produce. After the
 honour of making a formal decree to that effect was refused to you by the means of that
 tribune of the people, who as he was unable of himself to injure the republic, destroyed it as
 far as he could by the wickedness of another, you never kept silence concerning me, you never
 ceased to demand my safety from those consuls who had sold it. Therefore, at last it was owing to your authority and your zeal that that
 very year which I had preferred to have fatal to myself rather than to my country, elected
 these men as tribunes, who proposed a law concerning my safety, and constantly brought it
 under your notice. For the consuls being modest men, and having a regard for the laws, were
 hindered by a law, not by the one which had been passed concerning me, but by one respecting
 themselves, when my enemy had carried a clause, that when those men had come to life again who
 nearly destroyed the state, then I might return to the city. By which action he confessed two
 things—both that he longed for them to be living, and also that the republic would be in great
 peril, if either the enemies and murderers of the republic came to life again, or if I did not
 return. Therefore, in that very year when I had departed, and when the
 chief man of the state was forced to defend his own life, not by the protection of the laws,
 but by that of his own walls,—when the republic was without consuls, and bereft, like an
 orphan, not only of its regular parents, but even of its annual guardians,—when you were
 forbidden to deliver your opinions,—when the chief clause of my proscription was repeatedly
 read,—still you never hesitated to consider my safety as united with the general welfare. But when, by the singular and admirable virtue of Publius Lentulus the
 consul, you began on the first of January to see light arising in the republic out of the
 clouds and darkness of the preceding year,—when the great reputation of Quintus Metellus, that
 most noble and excellent man, and the virtue and loyalty of the praetors, and of nearly all
 the tribunes of the people, had likewise come to the aid of the republic,—when Cnaeus
 Pompeius, the greatest man for virtue, and glory, and achievements that any nation or any age
 has ever produced, the most illustrious man that memory can suggest thought that he could
 again come with safety into the senate,—then your unanimity with respect to my safety was so
 great that my body only was absent, my dignity had already returned to this country.