He is a pest and savage monster, such
as are fabled to have beset the strait by which we are separated
from Sicily, for the destruction of mariners. And yet if he had been
content to be the only person to vent his villany, his lust, and
rapacity upon your allies, that one gulf, deep as it was, we would
however have filled up by our patience. But the case is, he has
made every one of your centurions and soldiers a Pleminius, so
indiscriminately has he willed that licentiousness and wickedness
should be practised. All plunder, spoil, beat, wound, and slay; all
defile matrons, virgins, and free-born youths torn from the embraces
of their parents. Our city is captured daily, plundered daily. Day
and night, every place indiscriminately rings with the lamentations of
women and children, seized and carried away. Any one, acquainted with
our sufferings, might be astonished how it is that we are capable of
bearing them, or that the authors of them are not yet satiated with
inflicting such enormous cruelties. Neither am I able to go through
with them, nor is it worth your while to listen to the particulars of
our sufferings. I will embrace them all in a general description.
I declare that there is not a house or a man at Locri exempt from
injury. I say that there cannot be found any species of villany, lust,
or rapacity which has not been exercised on every one capable of being
the object of them. It would be difficult to determine in which case
the city was visited with the more horrible calamity, whether when it
was captured by an enemy, or when a sanguinary tyrant crushed it
by violence and arms. Every evil, conscript fathers, which captured
cities suffer, we have suffered, and do now as much as ever suffer.
All the enormities which the most cruel and savage tyrants are wont
to perpetrate upon their oppressed subjects, Pleminius has perpetrated
upon ourselves, our children, and our wives.

18. "There is one circumstance, however, in complaining of which
particularly we may be allowed to yield to our deeply-rooted sense of
religion, and indulge a hope that you will listen to it; and, if it
shall seem good to you, conscript fathers, free your state from
the guilt of irreligious conduct. For we have seen with how great
solemnity you not only worship your own deities, but entertain even
those of foreign countries. We have a fane dedicated to Proserpine, of
the sanctity of which temple I imagine some accounts must have reached
you