[219]
However, I give up this point too to you. Disregard what is past, if you please; but
do not destroy their hopes for the future, and ruin all the provinces; guard against
this,—against opening, by your authority, a visible and broad way for
avarice, which up to this time has been in the habit of advancing by secret and
narrow paths; for if you approve of this, and if you decide that it is lawful for
money to be taken on that pretext, at all events there is no one except the most
foolish of men who will not for the future do what as yet no one except the most
dishonest of men ever has done; they are dishonest men who exact money contrary to
the laws, they are fools who omit to do what it has been decided that they may do.
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.