Читать книгу Against Verres - Marcus Tullius Cicero - Страница 36

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First of all take notice of their brevity—"I received," says he, "two million two hundred and thirty-five thousand four hundred and seventeen sesterces; I spent, for pay to the soldiers, for corn, for the lieutenants, for the pro-quaestor, for the praetorian cohort, sixteen hundred and thirty-five thousand four hundred and seventeen sesterces; I left at Ariminum six hundred thousand sesterces." Is this giving in accounts? Did either I, or you, O Hortensius, or any man ever give in his accounts in this manner? What does this mean? what impudence it is! what audacity! What precedent is there of any such in all the number of accounts that have ever been rendered by public officers? And yet these six hundred thousand sesterces, as to which he could not even devise a false account of whom he had paid them to, and which he said he had left at Ariminum,—these six hundred thousand sesterces which he had in hand, Carbo never touched, Sulla never saved them, nor were these ever brought into the treasury. He selected Ariminum as the town, because at the time when he was giving in his accounts, it had been taken and plundered.^[3] He did not suspect, what he shall now find out, that plenty of the Ariminians were left to us after that disaster as witnesses to that point. Read now—³⁷"Accounts rendered to Publius Lentulus, and Lucius Triarius, quaestors of the city." Read on—"According to the decree of the senate." In order to be allowed to give in accounts in such a manner as this, he became one of Sulla's party in an instant, and not for the sake of contributing to the restoration of honour and dignity to the nobility. Even if you had deserted empty-handed, still your desertion would be decided to be wicked, your betrayal of your consul, infamous. Oh, Cnaeus Carbo was a bad citizen, a scandalous consul, a seditious man. He may have been so to others: when did he begin to be so to you? After he entrusted to you the money, the supplying of corn, all his accounts, and his army; for if he had displeased you before that, you would have done the same as Marcus Piso did the year after. When he had fallen by lot to Lucius Scipio, as consul, he never touched the money, he never joined the army at all. The opinions he embraced concerning the republic he embraced so as to do no violence to his own good faith, to the customs of our ancestors, nor to the obligations imposed on him by the lot which he had drawn.