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sufficient to restore things to the condition in which he found them.

8. For it is notorious, that during the time of his tyranny, the Sicilians neither enjoyed the protection of their original laws, of the regulations made for their benefit by the Roman senate upon their coming under the protection of the commonwealth, nor of the natural and unalienable rights of men.

9. His nod has decided all causes in Sicily these three years; and his decisions have broken all law, all precedent, all right. The sums he has by arbitrary taxes and unheard of impositions, extorted from the industrious poor, are not to be computed. The most faithful allies of the commonwealth have been treated as enemies.

10. Roman citizens have, like slaves, been put to death with tortures. The most atrocious criminals, for money, have been exempted from deserved punishments; and men of the most unexceptionable characters condemned and banished unheard.

11. The barbours, though sufficiently fortified, and the gates of strong towns, opened to pirates and ravagers; the soldiery and sailors belonging to a province under the protection of the commonwealth, starved to death; whole fleets, to the great detriment of the province, suffered to perish; the ancient monuments of either Sicilian or Roman greatness, the statues of heroes and princes carried off; and the temples stripped of their images.

12. The infamy of his lewdness has been such as decency forbids me to describe; nor will I by mentioning particulars, put those unfortunate persons to fresh pain, who have not been able to save their wives & daughters from his impurity.

13. And these his atrocious crimes, have been committed in so public a manner, that there is no one who has heard of his name, but could reckon up his actions. Having, by his iniquitous sentences, filled the prisons with the most industrious and deserving of the people, he then proceeded to order numbers of Roman citizens to be strangled in the jails; so that the exclamation, "I am a citizen of Rome," which has often, in the most distant regions and among the most barbarous people, been a protection, was of no service to them, but on the contrary, brought upon them a speedier and more severe punishment.

14. I ask now, Verres, what you have to advance against

this charge? Will you pretend to deny it? Will you pretend that any thing false, that even any thing aggravated is alleged against you? Had any prince, or any state committed the same outrage against the privilege of Roman citizens, should we not think we had sufficient ground for declaring immediate war against them.

15. What punishment then ought to be inflicted upon a tyrannical and wicked pretor, who dared, at no greater distance than Sicily, within sight of the Italian coast, to put to the infamous death of crucifixion, that unfortunate and innocent citizen, Publius Gavius Cosanus, only for his having asserted his privilege of citizenship, and declared his intention of appealing to the justice of his country against a cruel oppressor, who had unjustly confined him in prison, at Syracuse, from whence he had just made his escape.

16. The unhappy man, arrested as he was going to embark for his native country, is brought before the wicked pretor. With eyes darting fury, and a countenance distorted with cruelty, he orders the helpless victim of his rage to be stripped, and rods to be brought; accusing him, but without the least shadow of evidence, or even of suspicion, of having come to Sicily as a spy.

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17. It was in vain that the unhappy man cried out, "I am a Roman citizen-I have served under Lucius Pretius, who is now at Panormas, and will attest my innocence." The blood-thirsty pretor, deaf to all he could urge in his own defence, ordered the infamous punishment to be inflicted. Thus, fathers, was an innocent Roman citizen publicly mangled with scourging, whilst the only words he uttered amidst his cruel sufferings, were, "I am a Roman citizen!"

18. With these he hoped to defend himself from violence and infamy: But of so little service was this privilege to him, that while he was thus asserting his citizenship, the order was given for his execution-for his execution upon the cross!

19. Oliberty!-O sound, once delightful to every Roman ear!-O sacred privilege of Roman citizenship! once sacred -now trampled upon? But what then! Is it come to this?

20. Shall an inferior magistrate, a governor who holds his own power of the Roman people, in a Roman province, within sight of Italy, bind, scourge, torture with fire and red hot plates of iron, and at last put to the infamous death of the cross a Roman citizen!

21. Shall neither the cries of innocence, expiring in agony, nor the tears of pitying spectators, nor the majesty of the Roman commonwealth, nor the fear of the justice of his country, restrain the licentious and wanton cruelty of a monster, who in confidence of his riches, strikes at the root of liberty, and sets mankind at defiance?

22. I conclude with expressing my hopes, that your wisdom, and justice, fathers, will not, by suffering the atrocious and unexampled insolence of Caius Verres to escape due punishment, leave room to apprehend the danger of a total subversion of authority, and introduction of general anarchy and confusion.

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LXII. Speech of CANULEIUS, a Roman Tribune, to the Consuls; in which he demands that the Plebians may be admitted into the consulship; and that the Law prohibiting Patricians and Piebians from intermarrying, may be repealed. HAT an insult upon us is this! If we are not so rich as the Patricians, are we not citizens of Rome as well as they? Inhabitants of the same country? members of the same community? The nations bordering upon Rome, and even strangers more remote, are admitted not only to marriages with us, but to what is of much greater importance, the freedom of the city.

2. Are we, because we are commoners, to be worse treated than strangers? and when we demand that the people may be free to bestow their offices and dignities on whom they please, do we ask any thing unreasonable or new? Do we claim more than their original inherent right? What occasion then for all this uproar, as if the universe was falling to ruin? They were just going to lay violent hands upon me in the senate house.

3. What! must this empire then be unavoidably overturned? Must Rome of necessity sink at once, if a Plebian, worthy of the office, should be raised to the consulship? The Patricians, I am persuaded, if they could, would deprive you of the common light.

4. It certainly offends them that you breathe, that you speak, that you have the shapes of men. Nay, but to make a commoner a consul, would be, say they, a most enormous thing. Numa Pompilius, however, without being so much as a Roman citizen, was made king of Rome.

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5. The elder Tarquin, by birth not even an Italian, was nevertheless placed upon the throne. Servius Tullius, the son of a captive woman (nobody knows who his father was) obtained the kingdom as the reward of his wisdom and virtue.

6. In those days, no man in whom virtue shone conspicuous, was rejected or despised on account of his race and descent. And did the state prosper the less for that? Were not these strangers the very best of our kings? And supposing now, that a Plebian should have their talent and merit, must not he be suffered to govern us?

7. But, we find upon the abolition of the legal power, no commoner was chosen to the consulate." And what of that? Before Numa's time there was no pontiffs in Rome. Before Servius Tullius' day, there was no census, no division of the people into classes and centuries. Whoever heard of consuls before the expulsion of Tarquin the proud? Dictators, we all know, are of modern invention; and so are the offices of tribunes, ediles, questors.

8. Within these ten years we have made decemvirs, and we have unmade them. Is nothing to be done but what has been done before? That very law forbidding marriages of Patricians and Plebians, is not that a new thing? Was there any such law before the decemvirs enacted it? And a most shameful one it is, in a free state.

9. Such marriages, it seems, will taint the pure blood of the nobility! Why, if they think so, let them take care to match their sisters and daughters with men of their own sort. No Plebian will do violence to the daughter of a Pa-` trician-Those are exploits for our prime nobles.

10. There is no need to fear that we shall force any body into a contract of marriage. But to make an express law to prohibit marriages of Patricians with Plebians, what is this but to show the utmost contempt of us, and to declare one part of the community to be impure and unclean.

11. They talk to us of the confusion there will be in families, if this statue should be repealed. I wonder they don't make a law against a commoner's living near a nobleman, or going the same road that he is going; or being present at the same feast, or appearing in the same market place.

12. They might as well pretend, that these things make confusion in families, as that intermarriages will do it.-Does not every one know that their children will be ranked

according to the quailty of their father, let him be a Patrician or a Plebian? In short, it is manifest enough, that we have nothing in view but to be treated as men and citizens? nor can they, who oppose our demand, have any motive to do it, but the love of domineering.

13. I would fain know of you, consuls and Patricians, is the sovereign power in the people of Rome, or in you? I hope you will allow, that the people can at their pleasure either make a law or repeal one.

14. And will you then, as soon as any law is proposed to them, pretend to inlist them immediately for the war, and hinder them from giving their suffrages, by leading them into the field.

15. Hear me, consuls. Whether the news of the war you talk of is true, or whether it is only a false rumour spread abroad for nothing but a colour to send the people out of the city, I declare as tribune, that this people who have already so often spilt their blood in our country's cause, are again ready to arm for its defence and its glory, if they may be restored to their natural rights, and you will no longer treat us like strangers in our own country.

16. But if you account us unworthy of your alliance by intermarriages, if you will not suffer the entrance to the chief offices in the state to be open to all persons of merit indifferently, but will confine your choice of magistrates to the senate alone; talk of wars as much as ever you please; paint, in your ordinary discourses, the league and power of our enemies ten times more dreadful than you do now, I declare, that this people whom you so much despise, and to whom you are nevertheless indebted for all your victories, shall never more inlist themselves; not a man of them shall take arms! not a man of them shall expose his life for imperious lords, with whom he can neither share the dignities of the state, nor in private life have any alliance by marriage.

LXIII. Speech of PUBLIUS SCIPIO to the Roman Army, before the battle of the Ticin.

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ERE you, soldiers, the same army which I had with me in Gaul, I might well forbear saying any thing to you at this time; for what occasion would there be to use exhortations to cavalry that had so signally van

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