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. And that month you were able to form an opinion as to what was the difference between me
 and my enemies. I abandoned my own safety, in order to save the republic from being (for my
 sake) stained with the blood of the citizens; they thought fit to hinder my return, not by the
 votes of the Roman people, but by a river of blood. Therefore, after those events, you gave no
 answers to the citizens, or the allies, or to kings; the judges gave no decisions; the people
 came to no vote on any matter; this body issued no declarations by its authority; you saw the
 forum silent the senate-house mute, the city dumb and dispirited.