However, be it so. You like to
 practise commerce. Why not at Pergamus? at Smyrna? at Tralles? where there are many Roman
 citizens, and where magistrates of our own preside in the courts of justice. You are fond of
 ease: lawsuits, crowds, and praetors are odious to you. You delight in the freedom of the
 Greeks. Why, then, do you alone treat the people of Apollonides, the allies who of all others
 are the most attached to the Roman people and the most faithful, in a more miserable manner than
 either Mithridates, or than your own father ever treated them? Why do you prevent
 them from enjoying their own liberty? why do you prevent them from being free? They are of all
 Asia the most frugal, the most conscientious men, the most remote from the luxury and
 inconstancy of the Greeks; they are fathers of families, are content with their own, farmers,
 country-people. They have lands excellent by nature, and improved by diligence and cultivation.
 In this district you wished to have some farms. I should greatly prefer, (and it would have been
 more for your interest too, if you wanted some fertile lands,) that you should have got some
 here somewhere in the district of Crustumii, or in the Capenate country. However, be it so. It is an old saying of Cato's,—“that money is balanced by
 distance.” It is a very long way from the Tiber to the Caicus,—a place in which Agamemnon
 himself would have lost his way, if he had not found Telephus for his guide. However, I give up
 all that. You took a fancy to the town. The country delighted you. You might have bought it.
 
 Amyntas is by birth, by rank, by universal opinion, and by his riches, the first man of that
 state. Decianus brought his mother-in-law, a woman of weak mind, and tolerably rich, over to his
 side, and, while she was ignorant of what his object was, he established his household in the
 possession of her estates. He took away from Amyntas his wife, then in a state of pregnancy, who
 was confined with a daughter in Decianus's house, and to this very day both the wife and
 daughter of Amyntas are in Decianus's house.