De Lege Agraria

I assure you with the most real sincerity, O Romans, that I applied myself to the reading and understanding of this law with these feelings, that if I had thought it well adapted to your interests, and advantageous to them, I would have been a chief mover in and promoter of it. For the consulship has not, either by nature, or by any inherent difference of object, or by any instinctive hatred, any enmity against the tribuneship, though good and fearless consuls have often opposed seditious and worthless tribunes of the people, and though the power of the tribunes has sometimes opposed the capricious licentiousness of the consuls. It is not the dissimilarity of their powers, but the disunion of their minds, that creates dissension between them.

Therefore, I applied myself to the consideration of the law with these feelings, that I wished to find it calculated to promote your interests, and such an one as a consul who was really, not in word only, devoted to the people; might honestly and cheerfully advocate. And from the first clause of the proposed law to the last, O Romans, I find nothing else thought of, nothing else intended, nothing else aimed at, but to appoint ten kings of the treasury, of the revenues, of all the provinces, of the whole of the republic, of the kingdoms allied with us, of the free nations confederate with us—ten lords of the whole world, under the pretence and name of an agrarian law.