נגד פלאקוס י״בAgainst Flaccus 12
א׳
1[97] To all these we have to add that Flaccus had before this been seeking to utilize the emperor to supplement his own efforts to injure us and laid his plans accordingly. We had decreed and ratified with our actions all the tributes to Gaius which were possible and were allowed by the laws and had submitted the decree to Flaccus, begging him since he would not have granted our request for an embassy to provide himself for its transmission.
ב׳
2[98] He read it and nodded his head several times in assent at each point, smiled gently, and looked pleased or pretended to be pleased, and said “I commend you all for your piety, and I will send it as you ask or will fulfil the duties of an envoy myself that Gaius may learn your gratitude.
ג׳
3[99] I will also testify myself from my own knowledge to your abundantly orderly and loyal behaviour without adding anything else, for the truth in itself is all-sufficient praise.”
ד׳
4[100] When we heard these promises we rejoiced and were thankful, feeling in our hopefulness as though Gaius had already read the decree. The hope was reasonable, since any communication sent by a viceroy with urgency secures a prompt decision by the head.
ה׳
5[101] But Flaccus, dismissing all consideration for our intentions and his own words and agreements, detained the decree in his own possession so that it might be supposed that we alone among men who dwell under the sun were hostile. Do not these actions show long unsleeping vigilance and careful preparation of the insidious attack against us and that it was not improvised in a fit of insanity, in an ill-timed outburst due to some perversion of the reason?
ו׳
6[102] But God, it is clear, who takes care for human affairs, rejected his flattering words so elegantly framed to cajole and the treacherous counsels against us debated in his lawless mind and in His compassion before long provided us with grounds for thinking that our hopes would not be disappointed.
ז׳
7[103] For when King Agrippa visited Alexandria and we told him of Flaccus’s malignant action, he rectified the matter, promised us that he would have the decree transmitted and took it and as we understand sent it, apologizing also for the delay and stating that we had not been slow to learn the duty of piety to the house of our benefactors; on the contrary we had been eager to show it from the first but had been deprived of the chance of proving it in good time by the spite of the Governor.
ח׳
8[104] At this point justice, the champion and defender of the wronged, the avenger of unholy men and deeds, began to enter the lists against him. For in the first place he was subjected to an unprecedented indignity and disaster such as had not befallen any of the viceroys in the past since the Augustan House assumed the sovereignty of land and sea.
ט׳
9[105] Some, indeed, of those who held governorships in the time of Tiberius and his father Caesar, had perverted their office of guardian and protector into domination and tyranny and had spread hopeless misery through their territories with their venality, robbery, unjust sentences, expulsion and banishment of quite innocent people, and execution of magnates without trial. But these people on their return to Rome, after the termination of their time of office, had been required by the emperor to render an account and submit to scrutiny of their doings, particularly when the aggrieved cities sent ambassadors.
י׳
10[106] For on these occasions the emperors showed themselves impartial judges; they listened equally to both the accuser and the defender, making it a rule to condemn no one offhand without a trial, and awarded what they thought to be just, influenced neither by hostility nor favour but by what actually was the truth.
י״א
11[107] Flaccus, on the other hand, not after his time of office, but in advance of the regular date, was encountered by justice, who hates evil and was indignant at the boundless excesses of his unjust and lawless actions.