[102]
For that, with respect to this
cause, I had no alarm, may be understood in the first place from this
consideration,—that you have no business to decide on that matter; and in the second
place, that Sulla himself passed a law respecting the rights of citizenship, avoiding any
taking away of the legal obligations and lights of inheritance of these men. For he orders the
people of Ariminum to be under the same law that
they have been. And who is there who does not know that they were one of the eighteen 1 colonies and that they were able to
receive inheritances from Roman citizens? But if the rights of citizenship could by law be
taken from Aulus Caecina, still it would be more natural for us and all good men now to
inquire by what means we could relieve from injustice, and retain as a citizen, a most
well-tried and most virtuous man, a man of the greatest wisdom, of the greatest virtue, of the
greatest authority at home, than now, when he could not lose any particle of his right of
citizenship, for any man to be found, except one like to you, O Sextus, in folly and
impudence, who should venture to say that his rights of citizenship have been taken from him.
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1 The old editions usually have “twelve,” but eighteen is the correction of Savigny, which Orellius calls “certissima.” In the second Punic War, a.u.c. 543, of the thirty colonies of the Roman people, twelve declared that they had no means of supplying the consuls with men or money. The other eighteen remained faithful to their allegiance, and of these eighteen Ariminum was one. Vide Livy, xxvii. 9,10.
M. Tullius Cicero. The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, literally translated by C. D. Yonge, B. A. London. Henry G. Bohn, York Street, Covent Garden. 1856.
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