[29]
And since you so despise the property of others, and boast in a most
intolerable manner of your own riches, I desire you to answer me, whether
you, while tribune of the people, made any treaties with foreign states, or
kings, or tetrarchs? whether you got any money out of the treasury by your
laws? whether you did not at that time deprive people of the most valuable
part of their privileges? whether it was Caesar or the farmers of the
revenue that you were robbing? And as this is the case, I ask you whether,
having been a most miserably poor man, you did not become an exceedingly
rich one that very year in which a most stringent law was passed about
extortion and peculation? So that all men may see that you trampled not only
on the acts of us whom you call tyrants, but even on the laws of your own
most intimate friend; before whom you are in the habit of employing hard
words against us, who are very friendly to him, while you abuse him in the
most insulting manner every time that you say that he is in the least degree
connected with you.
This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
M. Tullius Cicero. The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, literally translated by C. D. Yonge, B. A. London. George Bell & Sons, York Street, Covent Garden. 1891.
The National Endowment for the Humanities provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.