Kitap 38
47
"You have noticed, senators, that they bring a double charge against me; that I ought not to have made war on the Gauls, and that I conducted it in a rash and imprudent way. 'The Gauls,' they say, 'were not hostile to us, but you wantonly attacked them while they were quietly carrying out your orders.' I am not going to ask you, senators, to judge the Gauls who inhabit those countries from what you know of the savagery common to the race, and their deadly hatred to the name of Rome. Keep out of sight the infamous and hateful character of the race as a whole and judge those men by themselves. I wish Eumenes, I wish all the cities of Asia were here, and that you were hearing their complaints rather than the charges I am bringing. Send commissioners to visit all the cities of Asia and find out which has delivered them from the heavier thraldom, the removal of Antiochus beyond the Taurus or the subjugation of the Gauls. Let them bring back word how often the fields of those people have been devastated, how often they and all their property have been carried off, with hardly a chance of ransoming the captives, and knowing that human victims were being sacrificed and their children immolated. Let me tell you that your allies paid tribute to the Gauls, and would have been paying it now, though freed from the rule of Antiochus, if it had not been put a stop to by me.
