[83]
If you
take refuge in the intention of the interdict, and say that inquiry must be made into what
farm was meant when Aebutius was ordered to replace me, and if you think it not right for the
justice of the case to be caught in a trap made of words, then you come into my camp, you are
fighting under my standard. That is my defence; mine. I assert this loudly; I call all the
gods and men to witness, that, as our ancestors would allow no legal defence to be pleaded for
armed violence, the question before the court is not, where were the footsteps of the man who
was driven away, but what was the act of the man who drove him away; I say loudly, that the
man who was put to flight was driven away, that violence was offered to the man who was put in
danger of his life.
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, B. A. London. Henry G. Bohn, York Street, Covent Garden. 1856.
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.