[73]
Some ages
afterwards, Publius Scipio took Carthage, in the third Punic war; after which victory, (remark the
virtue and carefulness of the man, so that you may both rejoice at your national
examples of most eminent virtue, and may also judge tire incredible audacity of
Verres worthy of the greater hatred by contrasting it with that virtue,) he summoned
all the Sicilians, because he knew that during a long period of time Sicily had repeatedly been ravaged by the
Carthaginians, and bids them seek for all they had lost, and promises them to take
the greatest pains to ensure the restoration to the different cities of everything
which had belonged to them. Then those things which had formerly been removed from
Himera, and which I have mentioned before, were restored to the people of Thermae;
some things were restored to the Gelans, some to the Agrigentines; among which was
that noble bull, which that most cruel of all tyrants, Phalaris, is said to have
had, into which he was accustomed to put men for punishment, and to put fire under.
And when Scipio restored that bull to the Agrigentines, he is reported to have said,
that he thought it reasonable for them to consider whether it was more advantageous
to the Sicilians to be subject to their own princes, or to be under the dominion of
the Roman people, when they had the same thing as a monument of the cruelty of their
domestic masters, and of our liberality.
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M. Tullius Cicero. The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, literally translated by C. D. Yonge. London. George Bell & Sons. 1903.
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