are separated from Sicily, for the destruction of mariners.  And yet if he had been content to be the only person to vent his villany, his lust, and rapacity upon your allies, that one gulf, deep as it was, we would however have filled up by our patience.  But the case is, he has made every one of your centurions and soldiers a Pleminius, so indiscriminately has he willed that licentiousness and wickedness should be practised.  All plunder, spoil, beat, wound, and slay; all defile matrons, virgins, and free-born youths torn from the embraces of their parents.  Our city is captured daily, plundered daily.  Day and night, every place indiscriminately rings with the lamentations of women and children, seized and carried away.  Any one, acquainted with our sufferings, might be astonished how it is that we are capable of bearing them, or that the authors of them are not yet satiated with inflicting such enormous cruelties.  Neither am I able to go through with them, nor is it worth your while to listen to the particulars of our sufferings.  I will embrace them all in a general description.  I declare that there is not a house or a man at Locri exempt from injury.  I say that there cannot be found any species of villany, lust, or rapacity which has not been exercised on every one capable of being the object of them.  It would be difficult to determine in which case the city was visited with the more horrible calamity, whether when it was captured by an enemy, or when a sanguinary tyrant crushed it by violence and arms.  Every evil, conscript fathers, which captured cities suffer, we have suffered, and do now as much as ever suffer.  All the enormities which the most cruel and savage tyrants are wont to perpetrate upon their oppressed subjects, Pleminius has perpetrated upon ourselves, our children, and our wives.

18.  “There is one circumstance, however, in complaining of which particularly we may be allowed to yield to our deeply-rooted sense of religion, and indulge a hope that you will listen to it; and, if it shall seem good to you, conscript fathers, free your state from the guilt of irreligious conduct.  For we have seen with how great solemnity you not only worship your own deities, but entertain even those of foreign countries.  We have a fane dedicated to Proserpine, of the sanctity of which temple I imagine some accounts must have reached you, during the war with Pyrrhus; who, when sailing by Locri, on his return from Sicily, among other horrid enormities which he committed against our state, on account of our fidelity towards you, plundered also the treasures of Proserpine, which had never been touched up to that day; and then, putting the money on board his ships, proceeded on his journey himself by land.  What, therefore, was the result, conscript fathers?  The next day his fleet was shattered by a most hideous tempest, and all the ships which carried the sacred money were thrown on our shores.  That most insolent king, convinced by this so great disaster that there were