For Sextus Roscius of Ameria (151-154)

Are you reserved for this? Are you chosen for this? to condemn those whom cut-throats and assassins have not been able to murder? Good generals are accustomed to do this when they engage in battle—to place soldiers in that spot where they think the enemy will retreat, and then if any escape from the battle they make an onset on them unexpectedly. I suppose in the same way those purchasers of property think that you, that such men as you, are sitting here to catch those who have escaped out of their hands. God forbid, O judges, that this which our ancestors thought fit to style the public council should now be considered a guard to brokers!

Do not you perceive, O judges, that the sole object of all this is to get rid of the children of proscribed persons by any means; and that the first step to such a proceeding is sought for in your oaths and in the danger of Sextus Roscius? Is there any doubt to whom the guilt belongs, when you see on one side a broker, an enemy, an assassin, the same being also now our accuser, and on the other side a needy man, the son of the murdered man, highly thought of by his friends, on whom not only no crime but no suspicion even can be fixed? Do you see anything else whatever against Roscius except that his father's property has been sold?

And if you also undertake that cause; if you offer your aid in that business; if you sit there in order that the children of those men whose goods have been sold may be brought before you; beware, in God's name, O judges, lest a new and much more cruel proscription shall seem to have been commenced by you. Though the former one was directed against those who could take arms, yet the Senate would not adopt it lest anything should appear to be done by the public authority more severe than had been established by the usages of our ancestors. And unless you by your sentence reject and spurn from yourselves this one which concerns their children and the cradles of their infant babes, consider, in God's name, O judges, to what a state you think the republic will arrive.

It behoves wise men, and men endowed with the authority and power with which you are endowed, to remedy especially those evils by which the republic is especially injured. There is not one of you who does not understand that the Roman people, who used formerly to be thought extremely merciful towards its enemies, is at present suffering from cruelty exercised towards its fellow-citizens. Remove this disease out of the state, O judges! Do not allow it to remain any longer in the republic; having not only this evil in itself, that it has destroyed so many citizens in a most atrocious manner, but that through habituating them to sights of distress, it has even taken away clemency from the hearts of most merciful men. For when every hour we see or hear of something very cruel being done, even we who are by nature most merciful, through the constant repetition of miseries, lose from our minds every feeling of humanity.