M. Tullius Cicero, Against Verres
C. D. Yonge, Ed.

[169] He ought to have less hope now, O judges, now that you have to decide; and so much the less, in proportion as it is more honourable to be roused by the injuries of others than by one's own. What reply do you think of making to all this? Will you deny that you did it? Will you defend yourself on the ground that it was lawful for you to do it? How can you deny it? Can you deny it, to be convicted by the authority of such important letters, by so many farmers appearing as witnesses? But how can you say it was lawful? In truth, if I were to prove that you, in your own province, had lent on usury your own money, and not the money of the Roman people, still you could not escape; but when I prove that you lent the public money, the money decreed to you to buy corn with, and that you received interest from the farmers, will you make any one believe that this was lawful? a deed than which not only others have never, but you yourself have never done a more audacious or more infamous one. I cannot, in truth, O judges, say that even that which appears to me to be perfectly unprecedented, and about which I am going to speak next—I mean, the fact of his having actually paid very many cities nothing at all for their corn—was either more audacious or more impudent; the booty derived from this act was perhaps greater, but the impudence of the other was certainly not less.