[78]
In truth, if that is a wicked action, (which appears to me to be of all actions the
most base, and the most wicked,) to take money to influence a decision in a court of
law, to put up one's good faith and religion to auction; how much love wicked,
flagitious, and scandalous is it, to condemn a man from whom you have taken money to
acquit him?—so that the praetor does not even act up to the customs of
robbers, for there is honour among thieves. It is a sin to take money from a
defendant; how much more to take it from an accuser! how much more wicked still to
take it from both parties! When you had put up your good faith to auction in the
province, he had the most weight with you who gave you the most
money.—That was natural: perhaps some time or other some one else may have
done something of the same sort. But when you had already disposed of your good
faith and of your scruples to the one party, and had received the money, and had
afterwards sold the very same articles to his adversary for a still higher price,
are you going to cheat both, and to decide as you please? and not even to give back
the money to the party whom you have deceived?
This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
M. Tullius Cicero. The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, literally translated by C. D. Yonge. London. George Bell & Sons. 1903.
The National Endowment for the Humanities provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.