He does not deserve the name
of a freeman who will not express them.
* All have been confiscated in their turn.
*(2) Not his brother nor any near relation; but this mistake
does not affect the argument.
Few barbarous conquerors have ever made so terrible a revolution
in property. None of the heads of the Roman factions, when they
established crudelem illam hastam in all their auctions of rapine,
have ever set up to sale the goods of the conquered citizen to such an
enormous amount. It must be allowed in favor of those tyrants of
antiquity that what was done by them could hardly be said to be done
in cold blood. Their passions were inflamed, their tempers soured,
their understandings confused with the spirit of revenge, with the
innumerable reciprocated and recent inflictions and retaliations of
blood and rapine. They were driven beyond all bounds of moderation
by the apprehension of the return of power, with the return of
property, to the families of those they had injured beyond all hope of
forgiveness.
These Roman confiscators, who were yet only in the elements of
tyranny, and were not instructed in the rights of men to exercise
all sorts of cruelties on each other without provocation, thought it
necessary to spread a sort of color over their injustice. They
considered the vanquished party as composed of traitors who had
borne arms, or otherwise had acted with hostility, against the
commonwealth.
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