My friends - my dear friends, hear me. The Greeks know all about tyranny, and about struggle. Our word is stasis - the struggle between the many for their rights and the few for their wealth. The Romans are the few, the aristoi of a new Empire. The Syracusans were the great demos of the west once, struggling with Carthage for control of our island. Where are we now? Who are we now? Scattered and broken in the wind, grains of sand floating on the air. And the cities that once stood as our rivals, friends, enemies, brothers, sons - gone too. Dust in the wind, Athens, dust in the wind, Sparta, dust in the wind, all the tribes of the world that would stand on their feet and know the power of their citizens to rule.
But listen - it will not always be thus.
Even as a speck of dust or dirt blows through the air, or flows down a river, it still exists, can still knock into a rock or settle on a man's face. What of ten specks? What of a hundred? A thousand? Ten thousand? Wearing away, bit by bit, the demos is still there. The people, man by man, of Greece and Sicily and North Africa and all the lands that were once free.
That is my dream, my quest, my cause, my being. I have been bloodied for it, beaten for it, tortured for it with knives and clubs and whips. But still, here I stand. And I can do no other.