[82]
So,
when he had come to the conclusion that he must
have money to meet the situation, he announced
that he meant to make a trip to Alexandria and gave
[p. 259]
orders that matters should remain as they were until
his return. And so he went in haste to his friend
Ptolemy, then upon the throne, the second king
after the founding of Alexandria. To him he explained that he wished to restore constitutional
liberty to his country and presented his case to him.
And, being a man of the highest standing, he easily
secured from that wealthy king assistance in the
form of a large sum of money. And, when he had
returned with this to Sicyon, he called into counsel
with him fifteen of the foremost men of the city.
With them he investigated the cases both of those
who were holding possession of other people's property and of those who had lost theirs. And he
managed by a valuation of the properties to persuade
some that it was more desirable to accept money and
surrender their present holdings; others he convinced that it was more to their interest to take a
fair price in cash for their lost estates than to try to
recover possession of what had been their own. As
a result, harmony was preserved, and all parties went
their way without a word of complaint.
M. Tullius Cicero. De Officiis. With An English Translation. Walter Miller. Cambridge. Harvard University Press; Cambridge, Mass., London, England. 1913.
The Annenberg CPB/Project 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.