1Everything must be raised up by you alone, Gaius Caesar, which you perceive to lie struck down and laid low by the very onset of war, as was inevitable: the courts must be re-established, credit must be recalled, licentiousness must be checked, the birth rate must be increased, all that has already fallen apart and flowed away must be bound together by strict laws. 24It could not be avoided, in so great a civil war, in such a blaze of passions and of arms, that the shattered commonwealth, whatever the outcome of the war had been, should lose many ornaments of its dignity and many safeguards of its stability, and that each leader should do many things in arms which the same man, in the toga, would have forbidden to be done.
24All these wounds of war must now be healed by you, and no one but you can cure them. 25And so it was with reluctance that I heard that most famous and most wise saying of yours: 'I have lived long enough either for nature or for glory.' 25Long enough, if you will have it so, perhaps for nature, and I will add even, if you please, for glory: but, what is most important, certainly too little for your country. 25Therefore set aside, I beg you, that wisdom of learned men in despising death: do not be wise at our peril. 25For it often comes to my ears that you say that same thing too frequently, that you have lived long enough for yourself.
25I believe it, but I would accept it only if you lived for yourself alone, or if you had been born for yourself alone. 25Your achievements have embraced the safety of all the citizens and the whole commonwealth; 25you are so far from the completion of your greatest works that you have not yet laid the foundations that you plan. 25Will you here set the limit of your life not by the safety of the commonwealth but by your own contentment? 25What if that is not enough even for glory? 25for which you will not deny that you are most greedy, wise though you are. 26'Shall we then leave too little that is great?' you will say.
26No indeed: enough for others, however many, but too little for you alone. 26For whatever it is, however ample, it is too little at the time when there is something ampler. 26But if the outcome of your immortal achievements, Gaius Caesar, was to be this, that after defeating your adversaries you should leave the commonwealth in the state in which it now is, take care, I beg you, that your divine virtue may not win more admiration than glory; 26since glory is the illustrious and widespread fame of great services, whether to one's own citizens or to one's country or to the whole human race.