[146]
But, when not only the vote had been come to, but when it had
even been drawn up in due form and entered in the records, an appeal is made to the
praetor. But who makes this appeal? Any magistrate? No. Any senator? Not even that.
Any Syracusan? Far from it. Who, then, appeals to the praetor? The man who had been
Verres's quaestor, Caesetius. Oh, the ridiculous business! Oh, the deserted man! O
man despaired of and abandoned by the Sicilian magistracy! In order to prevent the
Sicilians passing a resolution of the senate, or from obtaining their rights
according to their own customs and their own laws, an appeal is made to the praetor,
not by any friend of his, not by any connection, not, in short, by any Sicilian, but
by his own quaestor. Who saw this? Who heard it? That just and wise praetor orders
the senate to be adjourned. A great multitude flocks to me. First of all, the
senators cry out that their rights are being taken away; that their liberty is being
taken away. The people praise the senate and thank them. The Roman citizens do not
leave me. And on that day I had no harder task, than with all my exertions to
prevent violent hands being laid on the man who made that appeal.
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.