[151]
Lastly, unquestionably that defence, under which you have constantly thought that
all your thefts and iniquities could be concealed, is cut from under your feet; that
you sold the tenths at a high price—that you consulted the interest of the
Roman people—that you provided for plenty of provisions. He cannot say
this, who cannot deny that he sold the tenths of one district for thirty thousand
modii less than he might have done; even if I were to
grant you this, that you did not grant them to Minucius because you had already
adjudged them to Apronius; for they say that that is what you are in the habit of
saying, and I am expecting to hear it, and I wish you would make that defence. But,
even if it were so, still you cannot boast of this as a great thing, that you sold
the tenths at a high price, when you admit that there were people who were willing
to buy them at a much higher price.
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.