What injury was done to the city? “But the city is very indignant at it.” I dare say. For the profit is wrenched from it contrary to its hopes, which had already been devoured in expectation. “But it complains;” and a most impudent complaint it is. For we cannot reasonably complain of everything at which we are annoyed. “But it accuses him in the severest language.” Not the city, but ignorant men do so, who have been stirred up by Maeandrius. And while on this topic I beg you over and over again to recollect how great is the rashness of a multitude,—how great the peculiar levity of Greeks,—and how great is the influence of a seditious speech in a public assembly. Even here, in this most dignified and well-regulated of cities, when the forum is full of courts of justice, full of magistrates, full of most excellent men and citizens,—when the senate-house, the chastiser of rashness, the directress in the path of duty, commands and surveys the rostra, still what storms do we see excited in the public assemblies? What do you think is the case at Tralles? is it the same as is the case at Pergamus? Unless, perchance, these cities wish it to be believed that they could more easily be influenced by one letter of Mithridates, and impelled to violate the claims of their friendship with the Roman people, and their own plighted faith, and all the rights and duties of humanity, than to injure by their evidence the son of a man whom they had thought it necessary to drive from their walls by force of arms.

Do not, then, oppose to me the names of those noble cities, for those whom this family has scorned as enemies, it will never be afraid of as witnesses. But you must confess, if your cities are governed by the counsels of your chief men, that it was not by the rashness of the multitude, but by the deliberate counsel of the nobles, that war was undertaken by those cities against the Roman people; or if that disturbance was at that time caused by the rashness of the ignorant mob, then permit me to separate the errors of the Roman people from the general cause.