Pro S. Roscio Amerino
Pro S. Roscio Amerino
Pro S. Roscio Amerino
Create successful ePaper yourself
Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.
52 CICERO<br />
tlie state, my own indiguation, and my opponents' aggressive<br />
wrongs have compelled me to say it : but Sextus<br />
Eoscius does not regard any of tliese acts as intolerable,<br />
he accuses no one, he makes no complaint about his own<br />
inheritance : he is a man without knowledge of the world,<br />
a farmer and a country man, and he thinks that all the<br />
deeds that you say were achieved by Sulla's agency were<br />
done in accordauce with custom, law, and right recognized<br />
by all nations : he wishes to depart from your presence<br />
freed from blame and delivered from this unseemly suspicion<br />
; (144) if he is free from this dishonourable<br />
suspicion, he says he can bear in patience the loss of all<br />
his belongiugs ; if , Chrysogonus, he has turned to his own<br />
use notbiug out of his father's vast wealth, if he has<br />
cheated you in no single detail, if in perfect good faith he<br />
has handed over, counted up, and weighed out to you his<br />
all, if he gave up to you the clothing which covered his back<br />
and his own riug from his fiager, if he saved out of all<br />
these possessions his naked body only and not a thing<br />
besides, he asks and entreats you, Chrysogonus, to allow<br />
him, a guiltless man, to pass his life in poverty, supported<br />
by his friends.<br />
145. You are occupying my estates, I am living on<br />
another's charity: I allow it, both because I am of a<br />
patient temper, and because I must. My house is open to<br />
you, and closed to me: I suffer it to be so. Tou make<br />
use of my very niunerous household, I have not a slave ; I<br />
put up with it, and I think it can be suifered. "VVhat<br />
more do you want ? Why do you pursue me ? Why do<br />
you attack me ? In what matter do you think your wishes<br />
have been interfered with by me ? Where am 1 opposing<br />
your interests? In what do you find me a stumblingbloclv<br />
? If you want to kill the mau for the sake of the<br />
spoil, why ask for more ? If it is from feelings of enmity,<br />
what feelings of enmity can you have agaiust a man whose<br />
property you seized before you knew the man himself ? If<br />
it is from fear, have you auything to fear from a man who^you<br />
see^is unable vnthout aid to defend himself from so<br />
cruel a wrong ? But if you are striving to ruin my client,<br />
Eoscius' son, because the property which belonged to
Change language