Lastly, can anything appear holy or solemn in the eyes of those men, who, if
 ever they are so much influenced by any fear as to think it necessary to propitiate the immortal
 gods, defile their altars and temples with human victims? So that they cannot pay proper honour
 to religion itself without first violating it with wickedness. For who is ignorant that, to this
 very day, they retain that savage and barbarous custom of sacrificing men? What, therefore, do
 you suppose is the good faith, what the piety of those men, who think that even the immortal
 gods can be most easily propitiated by the wickedness and murder of men? Will you connect your
 own religious ideas with these witnesses? Will you think that anything is said holily or
 moderately by these men? Will your minds, pure and upright as
 they are, bring themselves into such a state that, when all our ambassadors who for the last
 three years have arrived in Gaul , when all the Roman
 knights who have been in that province, when all the traders of that province, when, in short,
 all the allies and friends of the Roman people who are in Gaul , wish Marcus Fonteius to be safe, and extol him on their oaths both in public
 and in private, you should still prefer to give your decision in unison with the Gauls?
 Appealing to comply with what? With the wishes of men? Is then the wish of our enemies to have
 more authority in your eyes than that of our countrymen? With the dignity of the witnesses? Can
 you then possibly prefer strangers to people whom you know, unjust men to just ones, foreigners
 to countrymen, covetous men to moderate ones, mercenary men to disinterested ones, impious men
 to conscientious ones, men who are the greatest enemies to our dominions and to our name, to
 good and loyal allies and citizens? Are you then hesitating, O judges, when all these nations have an innate hatred to and wage
 incessant war with the name of the Roman people? Do you think that, with their military cloaks
 and their breeches, they come to us in a lowly and submissive spirit, as these do, who having
 suffered injuries fly to us as suppliants and inferiors to beg the aid of the judges? Nothing is
 further from the truth. On the contrary, they are strolling in high spirits and with their heads
 up, all over the forum, uttering threatening expressions, and terrifying men with barbarous and
 ferocious language; which, in truth, I should not believe, O judges, if I had not repeatedly
 heard such things from the mouths of the accusers themselves in your presence,—when they warned
 you to take care, lest, by acquitting this man, you should excite some new Gallic war.
 If, O judges, everything was wanting to Marcus Fonteius in
 this cause; if he appeared before the court, having passed a disgraceful youth and an infamous
 life, having been convicted by the evidence of virtuous men of having discharged his duties as a
 magistrate (in which his conduct has been under your own eye) and as a lieutenant, in a most
 scandalous manner, and being hated by all his acquaintances; if in his trial he were overwhelmed
 with the oral and documentary evidence of the Narbonnese colonists of the Roman people, of our
 most faithful allies the Massilians, and of all the citizens of Rome ; still it would be your duty to take the greatest care, lest you should
 appear to be afraid of those men, and to be influenced by their threats and menaced terrors, who
 were so prostrate and subdued in the times of your fathers and forefathers, as to be
 contemptible. But now, when no good man says a word against
 him, but all your citizens and allies extol him; when those men attack him who have repeatedly
 attacked this city and this empire; and when the enemies of Marcus Fonteius threaten you and the
 Roman people; when his friends and relations come to you as suppliants, will you hesitate to
 show not only to your own citizens, who are mainly influenced by glory and praise; but also to
 foreign tribes and nations, that you, in giving your votes, prefer sparing a citizen to yielding
 to an enemy?