1It remains, it seems, to speak of the authority and opinion of Catulus. 1When he asked you in whom you would place your hope, if you put everything in Pompey alone and anything happened to him, he reaped a great reward for his merit and dignity, when with almost one voice you all said that you would place your hope in him himself. 1Indeed, he is such a man that there is no task so great and so difficult that he could not direct it by his counsel, guard it by his integrity and complete it by his merit. 1But on this very point I disagree with him most strongly, because the less certain and the less lasting the life of men is, the more the state ought, while the immortal gods allow, to enjoy the life and merit of a supreme man.
60But, they say, let nothing new be done contrary to the precedents and principles of our ancestors. 60I shall not say here that our ancestors always deferred to custom in peace and to expediency in war, that they always adapted new plans to the new circumstances of the times; I shall not say that two very great wars, the Punic and the Spanish, were finished by one commander, and that two very powerful cities which most threatened this empire, Carthage and Numantia, were destroyed by the same Scipio; I shall not mention that lately you and your fathers decided that the hope of the empire should rest on Marius alone, so that the same man should conduct the war against Jugurtha, against the Cimbri and against the Teutones; 60in the case of Pompey himself, for whom Catulus wants nothing new to be established, recall how many new things have been established with Catulus' full consent.