[30]
Why is this? Why did so many bold, honourable,
and highly esteemed men—so many Sicilians, so many Roman
knights—when injured by one most worthless and infamous man, not seek to
recover the eightfold penalty, which had most unquestionably been incurred? What is
the cause, what is the reason? That reason alone, O judges, which you
see,—because they knew they should come off at the trial defrauded and
ridiculed. In truth, what sort of triad must that be, when three of the profligate
and abandoned retinue of Verres sat on the tribunal under the name of
judges?—slaves of Verres, not inherited by him from his father, but
recommended to him by his mistress.
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.