[-7-] For reason their removal was equally in all other respects of a tumultuous and confused appearance. The departing citizens, practically all of whom were the foremost men of the senate and of the knights and of the populace, nominally were setting out for war, but really were undergoing the experiences of captives. They were terribly distressed at being compelled to abandon their country and their pursuits there, and to consider foreign walls more native than their own. Such as removed with their entire household said farewell to the temples and their houses and their paternal threshold with the feeling that these would straightway become the property of their opponents: they themselves, not being ignorant of Pompey's intention, had the purpose, in case they should survive, of establishing themselves in Macedonia or Thrace. And those who left behind on the spot their children and wives and their other most valued possessions appeared to have some little hope of their country but really fared much worse than the others, since being sundered from their dearest treasures they exposed themselves to a double and most hostile fortune. For in delivering their closest interests to the power of their bitterest foes they were destined to play the coward and yet themselves encounter danger, to show zeal and yet to be deprived of what they prized: moreover they would find a friend in neither rival, but an enemy in both,--in Caesar because they themselves did not remain behind, and in Pompey because they did not take the others with them. Hence they assumed a twofold attitude in their decisions, in their prayers, and in their hopes: with their bodies they were being drawn away from those nearest to them, and their souls they found cleft in twain.
[-8-] These were the feelings of the departing throng: and those left behind had to face a different, but equally unpleasant situation. Bereft of the association of their nearest relatives, deprived, as it were, of their guardians and far from able to defend themselves, exposed to the enemy and about to be subject to the authority of him who should make himself master of the city, they were themselves distressed by fear both of outrages and of murders as if they were already taking place. In view of these same possibilities such as were angry at the fugitives, because they themselves had been left in the lurch, cursed them for it, and those who condoned their action because of the necessity still felt consequent fears. The rest of the populace entire, even if they possessed not the least kinship with those departing, were nevertheless grieved at their fate, some expecting that their neighbors, and others that their comrades would go far away from them and do and suffer many unusual things. Most of all they bewailed their own lot, seeing the magistrates and the senate and all the rest who had any power,--they were not sure whether a single one of them would be left behind,--cast out of their country and away from them. They reflected how those men, had not many altogether dreadful calamities fastened themselves upon the State, would never have wished to flee, and they likened themselves, made destitute of allies, in every conceivable respect to orphaned children and widow women. Being the first to await the wrath and the lust of the oncoming foe, they remembered their former sufferings, some by experience and others by hearing it from the victims, all the outrages that Marius and Sulla had committed, and they therefore did not look to Caesar for moderate treatment.[68] On the contrary, because his army was constituted very largely of barbarians, they expected that their misfortunes would be far more in number and more terrible than those of yore.