נגד פלאקוס כ׳Against Flaccus 20
א׳
1[166] Such were the thoughts which held him ever firmly in their grip and so to speak flung him prostrate to the ground. He shunned meeting with people in large numbers because of the sense of shame which accompanied him. He did not go down to the harbour nor bring himself to enter the market but shut himself at home and there lay hidden not having even the courage to pass the threshold.
ב׳
2[167] Sometimes, too, in the dark hours of the morning when everyone else was still in bed he would come out without a soul seeing him and advance outside the wall and spend the day in the solitude, turning aside if anyone was about to meet him, his soul lacerated, poor wretch, and devoured by the vivid memories of his calamines. Then when the night had quite closed in he would go indoors, praying in his endless and boundless sorrow that the evening might be morning, so much did he dread the darkness and the weird visions which it gave him, if he chanced to fall asleep. So in the morning again he prayed for evening, for to the gloom that surrounded him everything bright was repugnant.
ג׳
3[168] A few months later he bought a small piece of ground and spent much of his time there in solitude, bewailing with tears and groans that such should be his fate.
ד׳
4[169] It is said that once about midnight he became possessed as in a Corybantic frenzy, and coming out of the shelter put up there turned his eyes to heaven and the stars, and beholding that veritable world within a world, lifted up his voice.
ה׳
5[170] “King of gods and men,” he cried, “so then Thou dost not disregard the nation of the Jews, nor do they misreport Thy Providence, but all who say that they do not find in Thee a Champion and Defender, go astray from the true creed. I am a clear proof of this, for all the acts which I madly committed against the Jews I have suffered myself.
ו׳
6[171] I allowed them to be robbed of their possessions by giving free licence to the plunderers. For that I had taken from me my heritage from father and mother and all I received by way of benefactions and gifts and other possessions which do not fall under this head.
ז׳
7[172] I cast on them the slur that they were foreigners without civic rights, though they were inhabitants with full franchise, just to please their adversaries, a disorderly and unstable horde, whose flattery, to my sorrow, deceived me, and, therefore, I have lost my rights and have been driven in exile from all the habitable world to be shut up here.
ח׳
8[173] Some I marched into the theatre and ordered them to be maltreated before the eyes of their bitterest enemies unjustly, and, therefore, justly was I maltreated in my miserable soul rather than in my body, with the utmost contumely; I was not indeed marched into one theatre or one city but was paraded through all Italy to Brundisium and through all the Peloponnese to Corinth and past Attica and the islands to Andros my prison.
ט׳
9[174] And I have a clear conviction that this is not the limit of my misfortunes but there are others in reserve to complete the sum and counterbalance all that I did. I killed some and when others killed them took no steps to punish the murderers. Some were stoned, some while still alive were burnt to death or dragged through the middle of the market-place till nothing at all was left of their bodies.
י׳
10[175] That their avenging furies await me I know full well. The ministers of punishment are already as it were standing at the barriers and press forward eager for my blood; every day or rather every hour I die in anticipation and suffer many deaths instead of the final one.”
י״א
11[176] He often became frightened and scared and while the limbs and members of his body shivered and shuddered, his soul shaken with his pantings and palpitations quailed with dread. For the one thing which is naturally capable of consoling human life, the comforter hope, he had lost.
י״ב
12[177] No favourable omen was vouchsafed to him, only all of evil omen, sinister sounds and voices, his waking hours spent in weariness, his sleep full of terrors, his solitude as the solitude of the beasts of the field. Then was life in the crowd what he craved for most? No, staying in a city was most hateful of all. Did his lone rural life, a slur though it was, bring safety? No, danger menacing with shameless insistence. Someone approaches quietly, he suspects him: “He is plotting something against me,”
י״ג
13[178] he says. “This one who comes walking fast surely has no other purpose for his hurry than to pursue me. This bland agreeable person is laying a snare. This frank talker is showing his contempt. My food and drink are given to me as to animals to keep them for the slaughter.
י״ד
14[179] How long shall I steel my heart against all these misfortunes? Yet I know that I do not boldly face death. For my destiny in its malignancy does not permit me to cut abruptly the thread of my wretched life, because there is still a huge stock of deadly ills which it treasures against me as boons to those whom I treacherously murdered.”