[148]
But when I understood that it was many recent messengers, and
many letters, not of introduction but of credit, that had had so much influence over
him, at the suggestion of the Syracusans themselves I make a seizure of those
documents in which the resolutions of the senate were recorded. And now behold a
fresh confusion and strife. That, however, you may not suppose that he was without
any friends or connections at Syracuse, that he was entirely desolate and forsaken, a man of the name
of Theomnastus, a man ridiculously crazy, whom the Syracusans call Theoractus. 1 attempted to detain those documents; a
man in such a condition, that the boys follow him, and that every one laughs at him
every time he opens his mouth. But his craziness, which is ridiculous to others, was
then in truth very troublesome to me. For while he was foaming at the mouth, his
eyes glaring, and he crying out as loud as he could that I was attacking him with
violence, we came together before the tribunal.
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.