For this day’s work, lords, you have encouraged treason and opened the prison doors to free the traitors. A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and he carries his banners openly against the city. But the traitor moves among those within the gates freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears no traitor; he speaks in the accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their garments, and he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation; he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of a city; he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to be feared. The traitor is the carrier of the plague. You have unbarred the gates of Rome to him.

****

Google AI Overview

The quote "A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within..." is from Taylor Caldwell's 1965 novel, "A Pillar of Iron". While it is often mistakenly attributed to Cicero, it was presented in the novel as a speech Cicero made in the Roman Senate in 58 B.C., recorded by Sallust. Caldwell's work is a fictionalized account, and the quote cannot be found in authentic Cicero writings, according to PolitiFact.