[39]
On this he immediately sends men on whom he can rely to
Melita; he writes to certain inhabitants
of Melita to search out those vessels for
him; he desires Diodorus to give them letters to that relation of his—the
time appeared to him endless till he could see those pieces of plate. Diodorus, a
prudent and careful man, who wished to keep his own property, writes to his relation
to make answer to those men who came from Verres, that he had sent the cups to
Lilybaeum a few days before. In the
meantime he himself leaves the place. He preferred leaving his home, to staying in
it and losing that exquisitely wrought silver work. But when Verres heard of this,
he was so agitated that he seemed to every one to be raving, and to be beyond all
question mad. Because he could not steal the plate himself, he said that he had been
robbed by Diodorus of some exquisitely wrought vessels; he poured out threats
against the absent Diodorus; he used to roar out before people; sometimes he could
not restrain his tears. We have heard in the mythology of Eriphyla being so covetous
that when she had seen a necklace, made, I suppose, of gold and jewels, she was so
excited by its beauty, that she betrayed her husband for the sake of it. His
covetousness was similar; but in one respect more violent and more senseless,
because she was desiring a thing which she had seen, while his wishes were excited
not only by his eyes, but even by his ears.
This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
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.