[57]
What injury was done to the city? “But the city is very indignant at
it.” I dare say. For the profit is wrenched from it contrary to its hopes, which had
already been devoured in expectation. “But it complains;” and a most
impudent complaint it is. For we cannot reasonably complain of everything at which we are
annoyed. “But it accuses him in the severest language.” Not the city, but
ignorant men do so, who have been stirred up by Maeandrius. And while on this topic I beg you
over and over again to recollect how great is the rashness of a multitude,—how great
the peculiar levity of Greeks,—and how great is the influence of a seditious speech
in a public assembly. Even here, in this most dignified and well-regulated of cities, when the
forum is full of courts of justice, full of magistrates, full of most excellent men and
citizens,—when the senate-house, the chastiser of rashness, the directress in the
path of duty, commands and surveys the rostra, still what storms do we see excited in the
public assemblies? What do you think is the case at Tralles? is it the same as is the case at
Pergamus? Unless, perchance, these cities wish it to be believed that they could more easily
be influenced by one letter of Mithridates, and impelled to violate the claims of their
friendship with the Roman people, and their own plighted faith, and all the rights and duties
of humanity, than to injure by their evidence the son of a man whom they had thought it
necessary to drive from their walls by force of arms.
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