[60]
What shall we say? Whom, if we wish to speak good Latin,
can we properly call armed? Those, I imagine, who are prepared and equipped with shields and
swords. What then? Suppose you drive any one headlong from his farm with clods of earth, and
stones, and sticks; and if you are ordered to replace a man whom you have driven away with
armed men, will you say that you have complied with the terms of the interdict? If words are
to govern everything, —if causes are to be settled not by reason but by accidental
expressions, then you may say that you have done so, and I will agree. You will establish the
point, no doubt, that those were not armed men who only threw stones which they took up from
the ground; that lumps of turf and clods of earth were not arms; that those men were not
armed, who, as they passed by, had broken off a bough of a tree; that arms have their
appropriate classification, some for defending, others for wounding; and all who have not
those arms, you will prove to have been unarmed.
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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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