1You see how varied and changeable is the course of life, how wandering and fickle fortune is, how great the faithlessness in friendships, how pretences are fitted to the occasion, how great the flight of those nearest to us in times of danger, how great their timidity. 1There will come, there will surely come that time, and that day will one day dawn, when you, with your affairs safe, as I hope, but perhaps in some upheaval of our common times — and how often that happens, experience ought to have taught us — will long for both the goodwill of a very close friend and the loyalty of a most steadfast man and the greatness of spirit of the one bravest man since the human race was born.
70And yet who would believe this: that Gnaeus Pompey, most expert in public law, in the customs of our ancestors, in short in the affairs of state, when the senate had charged him to see that the state should suffer no harm — a single short clause by which the consuls have always been armed enough even when no arms were given — that he, given an army, given a levy, would have waited for a trial in punishing the designs of a man who was abolishing the courts themselves by violence? 70It has been judged sufficiently by Pompey, sufficiently, that these charges are falsely brought against Milo, since he passed a law under which, as I think, you ought to acquit Milo, and, as all admit, you may.
71And the fact that he sits in that place, surrounded by those forces of public guards, declares clearly enough that he is not bringing terror upon you — for what would be less worthy of him than to compel you to condemn a man whom he himself could punish both by ancestral custom and by his own right? — but is there for protection, so that you may understand that, in spite of that meeting of yesterday, you are free to judge as you think.