A peasant came to Rome, deputed by the villages that line the Danube, to denounce before the senate the corrupt and avaricious empire.
He was not a handsome man. There sprouted from his chin a tangled beard; his body hair was coarse and matted like a bear’s; his brow was thick, his nose askew, his eyes askance; he wore a filthy cloak of goatskins belted with a bulrush. This barbarian addressed the Romans thus:
“I call on all the gods to guide my tongue, to let me speak no word I must retract. Without their help, we men become infected with injustice and with evil. Lacking their assistance, we defy their laws—and earn our punishment. The torture that my homeland suffers now at Roman hands is testament to this: it must be for our faults, and not by your prowess, that we are subjugated. Hope, my friends, that heaven never edifies with misery your sinners, never arms a foreign people to effect its wrath, by making you their slaves in turn! And why, I wonder, are we yours? What makes you so superior to others? By what right are you the masters of the universe? And why, if so superior, do you disrupt our quiet lives? We cultivate our fields in peace, and are as skilled in arts as agriculture. What have you to teach us? We are dextrous and courageous; if we only honored greed and violence more, perhaps we’d wield the power—and would use it more humanely. We could scarce do worse: your magistrates, or ‘praetors’ as they’re called, commit unspeakable atrocities. Your altars are profaned, your gods appalled by their frenetical rapacity. They are unsatisfiable; not all our work, nor nature’s, can appease them. I beseech you to recall them home. We will no longer tend the crops or till the fields; we will abandon them, and dwell upon the mountaintops, without companionship or conversation. We refuse to bring into the world more woeful children who will only be exploited and oppressed by Romans. Those already born will not, we hope, live long. (If this seems criminal, the crime is yours.) Recall your praetors home, before they teach us laxity and vice. Corruption, too, is all I’ve seen in Rome so far. Unless I have some sinecures or money to dispense, it seems I have no recourse to the law; its ministers cannot find time for me. Perhaps I start to weary and displease you. Very well: I’m finished. Punish me, put me to death, for my sincerity.”
The senate, much astonished by this ugly savage, made him a patrician; sent new praetors to the Danube; and decreed his speech should serve as model for petitioners thenceforth—so smitten were they by its common sense, large-heartedness, and eloquent coherence.
You cannot judge a person by appearance.