[166]
This is the point I
press, this is what I dwell upon, O judges; with this single fact I am content. I
give up, I am indifferent to all the rest. By his own confession he must be
entangled and destroyed. You did not know who he was; you suspected that he was a
spy. I do not ask you what were your grounds for that suspicion, I impeach you by
your own words. He said that he was a Roman citizen. If you, O Verres, being taken
among the Persians or in the remotest parts of India, were being led to execution, what else would you cry out but
that you were a Roman citizen? And if that name of your city, honoured and renowned
as it is among all men, would have availed you, a stranger among strangers, among
barbarians, among men placed in the most remote and distant corners of the earth,
ought not he, whoever he was, whom you were hurrying to the cross, who was a
stranger to you, to have been able, when he said that he was a Roman citizen, to
obtain from you, the praetor, if not an escape, at least a respite from death by his
mention of and claims to citizenship?
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M. Tullius Cicero. The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, literally translated by C. D. Yonge. London. George Bell & Sons. 1903.
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