[48]
Will you dare also to make mention to me of the tenths? Do you, after such
wickedness, after such cruelty, after such numerous and serious injuries done to
people, when the whole province of Sicily
entirely depends on its arable land, and on its rights connected with that land;
after the cultivators have been entirely ruined, the fields deserted—after
you have left no one in so wealthy and populous a province—not only no
property, but no hope even remaining; do you, I say, think that you can acquire any
popularity by saying that you have sold the tenths at a better price than the other
praetors? As if the Roman people had formed this wish, or the senate had given you
this commission, by seizing all the fortunes of the cultivators under the name of
tenths, to deprive the Roman people for all future time of that revenue, and of
their supply of corn; and, as if after that, by adding some part of your own plunder
to the total amount got from the tenths, you could appear to have deserved well of
the Roman people. And I say this, as if his injustice was to be reproved in this
particular, that, out of a desire for credit to be got by surpassing others in the
sum derived from tenths, he had put forth a law rather too severe, and edicts rather
too stringent, and rejected the examples of all his predecessors.
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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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