[36]
What will you do? Though I ought not to
ask you for these accounts, for I ought to have your account-books and to produce
them. But you say that you never kept any accounts of your expenses in these years.
Make me out at least this one which I am asking for, the account of the plate, and I
will not mind the rest at present. “I have no writings of the sort; I
cannot produce any accounts.” What then is to be done? What do you think
that these judges can do? Your house was full of most beautiful statues already,
before your praetorship; many were placed in your villas, many were deposited with
your friends; many were given and presented to other people; yet you have no
accounts speaking of any single one having been bought. All the plate in Sicily has been taken away. There is nothing left to
any one that can be called his own. A scandalous defence is invented, that the
praetor bought all that plate; and yet that cannot be proved by any accounts. If you
do produce any accounts, still there is no entry in them how you have acquired what
you have got. But of these years during which you say that you bought the greatest
number of things, you produce no accounts at all. Must you not inevitably be,
condemned, both by the accounts which you do, and by those which you do not produce?
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