[32]
When you had granted this licence for plundering the cultivators to the collectors
of the tenths,—that is, to Apronius,—by allowing him to demand
as much as he chose, and to carry off as much as he demanded, were you preparing
this defence for your trial,—that you had promised by edict that you would
assign judges in a trial for an eightfold penalty? Even if in truth you were to give
power to the cultivator, not only to challenge his judges, but even to pick them out
of the whole body of the Syracusan assembly, (a body of most eminent and honourable
men,) still no one could bear this new sort of injustice,—that, when one
has given up the whole of one's produce to the farmer, and had one's property taken
out of one's hands, then one is to endeavour to recover one's property and to seek
its restitution by legal proceedings.
This text is part of:
M. Tullius Cicero. The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, literally translated by C. D. Yonge. London. George Bell & Sons. 1903.
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