[81]
What is the matter, Piso? do you choose to fight about words? Do you think it fit to make the cause
of justice and equity, the cause not of our property only, but of every man's property, to
depend on a word? I showed what my opinion was; what had been the course pursued by our
ancestors; what was worthy of the authority of those men by whom the cause was to be decided;
that that was honest, and just, and expedient for all men, that it should be considered with
what design and with what intention a law had been established, not in what words it was
framed. You pin me to the words. I will not be so pinned without objecting. I say that it is
not right, I say that this point cannot be maintained, I say that there is no single thing
which can be included in a law with sufficient accuracy, or guarded against, or excepted
against, if through some word being overlooked or placed in an ambiguous position, though the
intention and the truth is completely ascertained, that which is intended is not to prevail,
but that which is expressed, is.
This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
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.
The National Endowment for the Humanities provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.