Anne Courtillé

Dommage, mais il semble que cette citation soit extraite - et traduite - d'une fiction de Mrs.Taylor Caldwell, "A Pillar of Iron", datant de 1965, portant sur la vie de Cicéron :

"The budget should be balanced, the treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. The mobs should be forced to work and not depend on government for subsistence."

Certains critiques estiment (sans donner la source exacte) que Madame Taylor Caldwell ne fait que citer Cicéron.
D'autres, plus perspicaces, disent que la phrase est de l'auteur elle-même :

"In a letter to The Chicago Tribune (20 April 1971), John H. Collins, Professor of History at Northern Illinois University, reported that the attribution to Cicero, actually originated in A Pillar of Iron (1965), Taylor Caldwell's fictionalized account of the life of the senator. [...] this sentence is regularly attributed to Cicero, but it's Caldwell's own, not in Cicero's actual work. It can be found on page 483 of the 1965 edition published by Doubleday (Garden City, NY.) ".

Pas vraiment un "hoax", mais... ne rendons pas à Cicéron ce qui n'est pas à Cicéron !