1But occasions often arise when those things which seem most worthy of a just man and of the one we call a good man are changed and become their opposites, so that to return a deposit, to fulfil a promise, and whatever pertains to truth and good faith, it sometimes becomes just to depart from these and not to observe them. 1For it is fitting to refer back to those foundations of justice which I laid down at the beginning: first that no harm be done to anyone, then that the common good be served. 1When these change with circumstances, duty changes and is not always the same. 32For it can happen that some promise and agreement is such that fulfilling it would be disadvantageous either to the one to whom the promise was made or to the one who made it.
32For if, as the story goes, Neptune had not done what he had promised Theseus, Theseus would not have been bereaved of his son Hippolytus; 32for of three wishes, as it is written, this was the third, which in anger he wished concerning the death of Hippolytus; 32and when it was granted he fell into the deepest grief. 32Promises, then, should not be kept which are disadvantageous to those to whom you have made them, nor, if they harm you more than they benefit the one to whom you have made them, is it contrary to duty for the greater to be preferred to the lesser; 32for example, if you have arranged to come to someone in person as his advocate, and meanwhile your son has fallen gravely ill, it would not be contrary to duty not to do what you said, and the one to whom the promise was made would rather be departing from duty if he complained that he had been let down.
32Again, who does not see that those promises need not be kept which a man has made under compulsion through fear, or deceived by fraud? 32Most of these, indeed, are annulled by praetorian law, some by statutes. 33Wrongs also often arise through a kind of chicanery and an over-clever but malicious interpretation of the law. 33Hence that saying 'The height of law is the height of injustice' has now become a proverb well worn in common speech. 33In this kind many wrongs are committed even in public affairs, as by that man who, when a thirty days' truce had been made with the enemy, ravaged their fields by night, because the truce had been agreed for days, not nights.
33Not even our own countryman is to be approved, if it is true that Quintus Fabius Labeo, or someone else (for I have nothing but hearsay), when appointed by the senate as arbitrator between the people of Nola and of Naples about their boundaries, on coming to the spot spoke with each party separately, urging them not to act greedily or graspingly, and to prefer to step back rather than forward. 33When both had done so, a fair stretch of land was left in the middle. 33So he fixed their boundaries just as they themselves had stated; 33what was left in the middle he awarded to the Roman people. 33This is indeed cheating, not judging.
33Therefore such cleverness must be shunned in every matter.