[163]
O the sweet name of liberty! O the admirable privileges of our citizenship! O
Porcian law! O Sempronian laws! O power of the tribunes, bitterly regretted by, and
at last restored to the Roman people! Have all our rights fallen so far, that in a
province of the Roman people,—in a town of our confederate
allies,—a Roman citizen should be bound in the forum, and beaten with rods
by a man who only had the fasces and the axes through the kindness of the Roman
people? What shall I say? When fire, and red-hot plates and other instruments of
torture were employed? It the bitter entreaties and the miserable cries of that man
had no power to restrain you, were you not moved even by the weeping and loud groans
of the Roman citizens who were present at that time? Did you dare to drag any one to
the cross who said that he was a Roman citizen? I was unwilling, O judges, to press
this point so strongly at the former pleading; I was unwilling to do so. For you saw
how the feelings of the multitude were excited against him with indignation, and
hatred, and fear of their common danger. I, at that time, fixed a limit to my
oration, and checked the eagerness of Caius Numitorius a Roman knight, a man of the
highest character, one of my witnesses. And I rejoiced that Glabrio had acted (and
he had acted most wisely) as he did in dismissing that witness immediately, in the
middle of the discussion. In fact he was afraid that the Roman people might seem to
have inflicted that punishment on Verres by tumultuary violence, which he was
anxious he should only suffer according to the laws and by your judicial sentence.
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