For M. Tullius (6-10)

As all laws and all legal proceedings which seem at all harsh and severe have originated in the dishonesty and injustice of wicked men, so this form of procedure also has been established within these few years on account of the evil habits and excessive licentiousness of men. For when many families were said to be wandering armed about the distant fields and pasture lands, and to be committing murders, and as that fact appeared to concern not merely the estates of individuals, but the main interests of the republic, Marcus Lucullus, who often presided as judge with the greatest equity and wisdom, first planned this tribunal, and had regard to this object, that all men should so restrain their households that they should not only not go about armed to inflict damage on any one, but, even if they were attacked, should defend themselves by law, rather than by arms;

and though he knew that the Aquilian law [*]about damage existed, still he thought, that, as in the time of our ancestors both men's estates and their desires were less, and as their families, not being very numerous, were restrained by fear of important consequences, it very seldom happened that a man would be killed, and it was thought a nefarious and unprecedented atrocity; and therefore, that there was at that time no need of a system of judicial procedure with reference to bodies of men collected in a violent manner and armed; (for he thought that if any one established a law or a tribunal for matters which were not usual, he seemed not so much to forbid them as to put people in mind of them.)

In these times, when after a long civil war our manners had so far degenerated that men used arms with less scruple, he thought it necessary to establish a system of judicial procedure, with reference to the whole of a man's household, in the formula, “Which was said to have been done by the household,” and to assign judges,