[20]
The cities have nothing in the treasury, nothing in their revenues. There are two ways of
raising money,—by tribute, or by loan. No lists of creditors are brought forward; no
exaction of tribute is accounted for. But I pray you to remark how cheerfully they are in the
habit of producing false accounts, and of entering in their accounts whatever suits them,
forming your opinions by the letters of Cnaeus Pompeius to Hypsaeus, and of Hypsaeus to
Pompeius. [The letters of Pompeius and of Hypsaeus are read.] Do not we appear to prove to you
clearly enough, by the authority of these men, the profligate habits and impudent
licentiousness of the Greeks? Unless, perchance, we suppose that those men who deceived Cnaeus
Pompeius, and that too, when he was on the spot and when there was no one tempting them to do
so, were likely now to be either timid or scrupulous, when Laelius urged them to bear witness
against Lucius Flaccus in his absence.
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.