[48]
Do not now wait while I follow up this charge from door to door, and show you that
he stole a goblet from Aeschylus, the Tyndaritan; a dish from another citizen of
Tyndaris named Thraso; a censer from
Nymphodorus of Agrigentum. When I produce
my witnesses from Sicily he may select whom
he pleases for me to examine about dishes, goblets, and censers. Not only no town,
no single house that is tolerably well off will be found to have been free from the
injurious treatment of this man; who, even if he had come to a banquet, if he saw
any finely wrought plate, could not, O judges, keep his hands from it. There is a
man named Cnaeus Pompeius Philo, who was a native of Tyndaris; he gave Verres a supper at his visa
in the country near Tyndaris; he did
what Sicilians did not dare to do, but what, because he was a citizen of Rome, he thought he could do with impunity, he put
before him a dish on which were some exceedingly beautiful figures. Verres, the
moment he saw it, determined to rob his host's table of that memorial of the Penates
and of the gods of hospitality. But yet, in accordance with what I have said before
of his great moderation, he restored the rest of the silver after he had torn off
the figures; so free was he from all avarice!
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