These people carried themselves as masters,
extorted more than was due them, reduced the debtors to misery,
sometimes selling them as slaves. In Asia they even exiled the
inhabitants without any pretext. When Marius required the king of
Bithynia to furnish him with soldiers, the king replied that, thanks
to the publicans, he had remaining as citizens only women, children,
and old people. The Romans were well informed of these excesses.
Cicero wrote to his brother, then a governor, "If you find the means
of satisfying the publicans without letting the provincials be
destroyed, it is because you have the attributes of a god." But the
publicans were judged in the tribunals and the proconsuls themselves
obeyed them. Scaurus, the proconsul of Asia, a man of rigid
probity,[128] wished to prevent them from pillaging his province; on
his return to Rome they had him accused and condemned.
The publicans drove to extremities even the peaceable and submissive
inhabitants of the Orient: in a single night, at the order of
Mithradates, 100,000 Romans were massacred. A century later, in the
time of Christ, the word "publican" was synonymous with thief.
Pages:
326
327
328
329
330
331
332
333
334
335
336
337
338
339
340
341
342
343
344
345
346
347
348
349
350