He turns again to Verres.

"But why talk of Gavius? as though it were Gavius on whom you were
wreaking a private vengeance, instead of rather waging war against the
very name and rights of Roman citizenship. You showed yourself an enemy,
I say, not to the individual man, but to the common cause of liberty. For
what meant it that, when the authorities of Messana, according to their
usual custom, would have erected the cross behind their city on the
Pompeian road, you ordered it to be set up on the side that looked toward
the Strait? Nay, and added this--which you cannot deny, which you said
openly in the hearing of all--that you chose that spot for this reason,
that as he had called himself a Roman citizen, he might be able, from his
cross of punishment, to see in the distance his country and his home! And
so, gentlemen, that cross was the only one, since Messana was a city, that
was ever erected on that spot. A point which commanded a view of Italy was
chosen by the defendant for the express reason that the dying sufferer, in
his last agony and torment, might see how the rights of the slave and the
freeman were separated by that narrow streak of sea; that Italy might
look upon a son of hers suffering the capital penalty reserved for slaves
alone.

"It is a crime to put a citizen of Rome in bonds; it is an atrocity to
scourge him; to put him to death is well-nigh parricide; what shall I say
it is to crucify him?--Language has no word by which I may designate such
an enormity. Yet with all this yon man was not content. 'Let him look',
said he, 'towards his country; let him die in full sight of freedom and
the laws'. It was not Gavius; it was not a single victim, unknown to fame,
a mere individual Roman citizen; it was the common cause of liberty,
the common rights of citizenship, which you there outraged and put to a
shameful death".

But in order to judge of the thrilling effect of such passages upon a
Roman jury, they must be read in the grand periods of the oration itself,
to which no translation into a language so different in idiom and rhythm
as English is from Latin can possibly do justice. The fruitless appeal
made by the unhappy citizen to the outraged majesty of Rome, and the
indignant demand for vengeance which the great orator founds upon
it--proclaiming the recognised principle that, in every quarter of the
world, the humblest wanderer who could say he was a Roman citizen should
find protection in the nam