On the Olive Stump (26-30)

Now surely, when I pay so much regard to those small penalties, I cannot so utterly disregard the perils involved for my person. You find me taking all this care of the many olive-trees upon which I could more freely commit the offence, and I am on my trial to-day for clearing away the sacred olive which it was impossible to dig up unobserved!

And how—except in all the world I were my own most malignant enemy—could I have attempted, with you supervising as you do, to clear away the sacred olive from this plot; in which there is not a single tree, but there was, as he says, a stump of one olive; where a road skirts the plot all round, and neighbors live about it on both sides, and it is unfenced and open to view from every point? So who would have been so foolhardy in these circumstances, as to attempt such a proceeding?

And I feel it is extraordinary that you, whom the city has charged with the perpetual supervision of the sacred olives, have never either punished me for working over the one of them nor brought me to trial for having cleared one away, and that now this man, who, as it happens, is neither farming near me nor has been appointed a supervisor nor is of age to know about such matters, should have indicted me for clearing away a sacred olive from the land.