De Lege Agraria

Just revolve these things in your minds. . . . . Foreign nations can scarcely endure our lieutenants, though they are men of but slight authority, when they go on free lieutenancies, on account of some private business. For the name of power is a hard one to bear, and is dreaded even in ever so inconsiderable a person; because, when they have once left Rome they conduct their proceedings not in their own name, but in yours. What do you suppose will happen, when those decemvirs wander all over the world with their supreme power, and their faces, and their chosen band of surveyors? What do you suppose will be the feelings, what the alarm, what the actual danger of those unhappy nations?

Is there any terror in absolute power? they will endure it;—is there any expense entailed by the arrival of such men? they will bear it;—are any presents exacted from them? they will not refuse them. But what a business is that, O Romans, when a decemvir, who either has come to some city after being expected, as a guest, or unexpectedly, as a master, pronounces that very place to which he has come, that identical hospitable house in which he is received, to be the public property of the Roman people? How great will be the misery of the people if he says that it is so! How great will be his own private gain, if he says that it is not! And the same men who desire all this, are accustomed sometimes to complain that every land and every sea has been put under the power of Cnaeus Pompeius. But are these two cases, the one, of many things being entrusted to a man, the other, of everything being sacrificed to him, at all similar? Is there any resemblance between a man's being appointed as chief manager of a business requiring toil and labour, and a man's having the chief share in booty and gain allotted to him? in a man's being sent to deliver allies, and a man's being sent to oppress them? Lastly, if there be airy extraordinary honour in question, does it make no difference whether the Roman people confers that honour on any one it chooses, or whether he impudently filches it from the Roman people by an underhand trick of law?

You have now seen how many things and what valuable things the decemvirs are likely to sell with the sanction of the law. That is not enough. When they have sated themselves with the blood of the allies, and of foreign nations, and of kings, they will then cut the sinews of the Roman people; they will lay hands on your revenues; they will break into your treasury. For a clause follows, in which he is not content with permitting, if by chance any money should be wanting, (which, however, can be amassed in such quantities from the effect of the previous clauses, that it ought not to be wanting,) but which actually (as if that was likely to be the salvation of you all) orders and compels the decemvirs to sell all your revenues, naming each item separately.