[149]
Then I began to beg to be allowed to seal up and carry away the records. He spoke
against me; he denied that there had been any regular resolution of the senate
passed, since an appeal had been made to the praetor. He said that a copy of it
ought not to be given to me. I read the act, that I was to be allowed all documents
and records. He, like a crazy man as he was, urged that our laws had nothing to do
with him. That intelligent praetor decided that he did not choose, as the resolution
of the senate had no business ever to be ratified, to allow me to take a copy of it
to Rome. Not to make a long story of it,
if I had not threatened the man vigorously, if I had not read to him the provisions
of the act passed in this case, and the penalties enacted by it, I should not have
been allowed to have the documents. But that crazy fellow, who had declaimed against
me most violently on behalf of Verres, when he found he did not succeed, in order I
suppose to recover my favour, gives me a book in which all Verres's Syracusan thefts
were set down, which I had already been informed of by, and had a list of from them.
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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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