Pro L. Flacco

However, be it so. You like to practise commerce. Why not at Pergamus? at Smyrna? at Tralles? where there are many Roman citizens, and where magistrates of our own preside in the courts of justice. You are fond of ease: lawsuits, crowds, and praetors are odious to you. You delight in the freedom of the Greeks. Why, then, do you alone treat the people of Apollonides, the allies who of all others are the most attached to the Roman people and the most faithful, in a more miserable manner than either

However, be it so. It is an old saying of Cato's,—“that money is balanced by distance.” It is a very long way from the Tiber to the Caicus,—a place in which Agamemnon himself would have lost his way, if he had not found Telephus for his guide. However, I give up all that. You took a fancy to the town. The country delighted you. You might have bought it. Amyntas is by birth, by rank, by universal opinion, and by his riches, the first man of that state. Decianus brought his mother-in-law, a woman of weak mind, and tolerably rich, over to his side, and, while she was ignorant of what his object was, he established his household in the possession of her estates. He took away from Amyntas his wife, then in a state of pregnancy, who was confined with a daughter in Decianus's house, and to this very day both the wife and daughter of Amyntas are in Decianus's house.

Is there any one of all these circumstances invented by me, O Decianus? —All the nobles know these facts—virtuous men are acquainted with them—our own citizens are acquainted with them—all the merchants of ordinary consequence are acquainted with them. Rise, Amyntas: demand back from Decianus, not your money, not your estates; let him even keep your mother-in-law for himself; but let him restore your wife, let him restore the daughter to her miserable father: for the limbs which he has weakened with stones, with sticks, with weapons, the hands which he has crushed, the fingers which he has broken, the sinews which he has cut through, those he cannot restore. The daughter,—restore the daughter, I say, O Decianus, to her unhappy father.

Do you wonder that you could not get Flaccus to approve of this conduct? I should like to know who you did persuade to approve of it? You contrived fictitious purchases, you put up advertisements of estates in concert with some wretched women,—open frauds. According to the laws of the Greeks it was necessary to name a guardian to look after these matters. You named Polemocrates a hired slave and minister of your designs. Polemocrates was prosecuted by Dion for treachery and fraud on account of this very guardianship. What a crowd was there from all the neighbouring towns on every side! What was their indignation! How universal were their complaints! Polemocrates was convicted by every single vote; the sales were annulled, the advertisements were canceled. Do you restore the property? You bring to the men of Pergamus, and beg them to enter in their public registers, those beautiful advertisements and purchases of yours. They refuse, they reject them. And yet who were the men who did so? The men of Pergamus, your own panegyrists. For you appear to me to boast as much of the panegyric of the citizens of Pergamus, as if you had arrived at all the honours which had been attained by your ancestors. And you thought yourself in this respect better off than Laelius, that the city of Pergamus praised you. Is the city of Pergamus more honourable than that of Smyrna? Even the men of Pergamus themselves do not assert that.