“Do you say,” you ask, “that a man who has carried me across the river Po in a boat without charge gives me no benefit?” I do. He does me a good turn, but he does not give me a benefit; for he does it for his own sake, or, at any rate, not for mine. In short, even the man himself does not suppose that he is giving a benefit to me, but he bestows it for the sake of the state, or of the neighborhood, or of his own ambition, and in return for it he expects some sort of advantage quite different from that which he might receive from individual passengers. “What, then,” you say, “if the emperor should grant citizenship to all the Gauls, and exemption from taxes to all the Spaniards, would the individual on account of that owe him nothing?” Of course he would owe something, but he would owe it, not because of a personal benefit, but because of his share in a public benefit. “The emperor,” he says, “had no thought of me at the time when he benefited us all; he did not desire to give citizenship to me personally, nor did he direct his attention to me; so why should I feel indebted to one who did not put me before himself when he was thinking of doing what he did?” In the first place, when he planned to benefit all the Gauls, he planned to benefit me also; for I was a Gaul, and under my national, even if not under my personal, designation he included me. In the second place, I shall, in like manner, be indebted to him as having received, not a personal, but a general, gift; being one of the people, I shall not pay the debt as one incurred by myself, but shall contribute to it as one incurred by my country. If anyone should lend money to my country, I should not call myself his debtor, nor should I declare this as my debt when a candidate for office or a defendant in a suit7; yet I will pay my share toward quashing the indebtedness. So I deny that a gift which is given to an entire people makes me a debtor, because, while it was given to me, it was not given because of me, and, while it was given to me, the giver was not aware that he was giving to me; nevertheless I shall be aware that I must pay something for the gift, because after a roundabout course it arrived also at me. An act that lays me under obligation must have been done because of me.