[20]
But what law is this, O judges, which he
amends, or rather totally abrogates? A law framed with the greatest acuteness and
the greatest diligence, which gives up the cultivator of the land to the collector
of the tenths, guarded by so many securities, that neither in the corn fields, nor
on the threshing floors, nor in the barns, nor while removing his corn privately,
nor while carrying it away openly, can the cultivator defraud the collector of one
single grain without the severest punishment. The law has been framed with such
care, that it is plain that a man framed it who had no other revenues; with such
acuteness that it was plain that he was a Sicilian; with such severity, that he was
evidently a tyrant: by this law, however, cultivating the land was an advantageous
trade for the Sicilian; for the laws for the collectors of the tenths were also
drawn up so carefully that it is not possible for more than the tenth to be extorted
from the cultivator against his will.
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. London. George Bell & Sons. 1903.
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.