[36]
In the mean time, shall the praetor, O Piso, be silent in so important a matter? Shall he
have no power to restore you to the possession of your own house? He who is occupied for whole
days in repressing deeds of violence, and in ordering the restitution of what has been
obtained by such deeds; he who issues interdicts about ditches, about sewers, in the most
trifling disputes about water or roads, shall he on a sudden be struck dumb? Shall he in a
most atrocious case have nothing which he can do? And when Caius Piso is prevented from
entering his own house, from coming under his own roof—prevented, I say, by men
collected in a body and armed,—shall the praetor have no power of assisting him
according to established regulations and precedents? For what will he say? or what will you
demand after having sustained such a notable injury? No one ever issued an interdict in the
terms, “whether you were prevented by violence from coming.” That is a new
form; I will not say an unusual one, but a form absolutely unheard of. ”Whence you
were driven.” What will you gain by this, when they make you the same answer that
they now make me; that armed men opposed you and prevented you from entering your house;
moreover, that a man cannot possibly be driven out of a place, who has not entered into it?
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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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