Ungrateful is Coriolanus,15 who became dutiful too late, and after penitence for crime; he laid down his arms, but he laid them down in the midst of unholy war.
Ungrateful is Catiline; he is not satisfied with seizing his fatherland — he must overturn it, he must let loose against it the cohorts of the Allobroges, he must summon an enemy from beyond the Alps to satiate its old and inborn hatred, and pay with the lives of Roman leaders the sacrifices long owed to Gallic tombs.16
Ungrateful is Gaius Marius, who, though raised from the rank of a common soldier to repeated consulships, will feel that the change in his fortune has been too slight, and that he would sink to his former position did he not match the slaughter of the Cimbrians with a sacrifice of Roman lives, did he not; not merely give, but himself become, the signal for the destruction and butchery of his countrymen.
Ungrateful is Lucius Sulla, who healed his fatherland by remedies that were harsher than her ills, who, having marched through human blood all the way from the citadel of Praeneste to the Colline Gate, staged other battles, other murders inside the city; two legions that had been crowded into a corner he butchered; O! the cruelty of it, after he had won the victory, O! the wickedness of it, after he had promised them quarter; and he devised proscription, great gods! in order that anyone who had killed a Roman citizen might claim impunity, money, all but a civic crown!
Ungrateful is Gnaeus Pompeius, who in return for three consulships, in return for three triumphs, in return for the many public offices into most of which he had thrust himself before the legal age, showed such gratitude to the commonwealth that he induced others17 also to lay hands upon her — as if he could render his own power less odious by giving several others the right to do what no man ought to have had the right to do! While he coveted extraordinary commands, while he distributed the provinces to suit his own choice, while he divided the commonwealth in such a way, that though a third person18 had a share, two-thirds of it remained in his own family,19 he reduced the Roman people to such a plight that only by the acceptance of slavery were they able to survive.
The foe and conqueror20 of Pompeius was himself ungrateful. From Gaul and Germany he whirled war to Rome, and that friend of the people, that democrat, pitched his camp in the Circus Flaminius, even nearer to the city than Porsina’s had been. It is true that he used the cruel privileges of victory with moderation; the promise that he was fond of making he kept — he killed no man who was not in arms. But what of it? The others used their arms more cruelly, yet, once glutted, flung them aside; he quickly sheathed his sword, but never laid it down.
Ungrateful was Antony to his dictator, who he declared was rightly slain,21 and whose murderers he allowed to depart to their commands in the provinces. His country, torn as it had been by proscriptions, invasions, and wars, after all her ills, he wished to make subject to kings, who were not even Roman, in order that a city that had restored sovereign rights, autonomy, and immunity to the Achaeans, the Rhodians, and many famous cities, might herself pay tribute to eunuchs!22