[169]
But why need I say more about Gavius? as if you were hostile to Gavius, and not
rather an enemy to the name and class of citizens, and to all their rights. You were
not, I say, an enemy to the individual, but to the common cause of liberty. For what
was your object in ordering the Mamertines, when, according to their regular custom
and usage, they had erected the cross behind the city in the Pompeian road, to place
it where it looked towards the strait; and in adding, what you can by no means deny,
what you said openly in the hearing of every one, that you chose that place in order
that the man who said that he was a Roman citizen, might be able from his cross to
behold Italy and to look towards his own
home? And accordingly, O judges, that cross, for the first time since the foundation
of Messana, was erected in that place. A
spot commanding a view of Italy was picked
out by that man, for the express purpose that the wretched man who was dying in
agony and torture might see that the rights of liberty and of slavery were only
separated by a very narrow strait, and that Italy might behold her son murdered by the most miserable and most
painful punishment appropriate to slaves alone.
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