[126]
Do not you feel, O most audacious and
most senseless of omen, that you are destroyed by these letters? Do you not see
that, when your successor addresses those agriculturists who are left, he writes
this in express words, that they are left, not after war or after any calamity of
that sort, but after your wickedness, and tyranny, and avarice, and cruelty? Read
the rest—“But still in such quantities as the difficulty of the
times and the poverty of the cultivators permitted.” The poverty of the
cultivators, he says. If I, as the accuser, were to dwell so repeatedly on the same
subject, I should be afraid of wearying your attention, O judges; but Metellus cries
out, “If I had not written letters.” That is not
enough—“If I had not, when on the spot, assured them.”
Even that is not enough—“The cultivators who were
left,” he says. Left? In that mournful word he intimates the condition of
nearly the whole province of Sicily. He
adds, “the poverty of the cultivators.”
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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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