For A. Cluentius (111-115)

For just take the trouble to recollect not only his manners and his arrogance, but also his countenance, and his dress, and his purple robe reaching down as far as his ankles. He, as if it were a thing quite impossible to be borne that he should have been defeated in this trial, transferred the case from the court of justice to the public assembly. And do we still reiterate our complaints, that new men have not sufficient encouragement in this city? I say, that there never was a time or place where they had more; for here, if a man, though born in a low rank of life, lives so as to seem able to uphold by his virtue the dignity of nobility, he meets with no obstacle to his arriving at that eminence to which his industry and innocence conduct him.

But if any one depends on the fact of his being meanly born as his chief claim, he often goes greater lengths than if he was a man of the highest birth devoted to the same vices. As, in the case of Quinctius, (for I will say nothing of the others,) if he had been a man of noble birth, who could have endured him with his pride and intolerance? But because he was of the rank of which he was, people put up with it, as if they thought that if he had any good quality by nature, it ought to be allowed to save him and as if, owing to the meanness of his birth, they thought his pride and arrogance matters to be laughed at rather than feared.

But he had condemned him; but he had not heard the entire case; but he had been greatly and repeatedly annoyed at every assembly of the people, by Lucius Quinctius. Then the whole of Quinctius's judicial conduct was unjust, deceitful, fraudulent, turbulent, dictated by a wish for popularity, seditious. Be it so; Falcula may have been innocent. Well then, some one condemned Oppianicus without being paid for it; Junius did not appoint men as judges in the place of the others, to condemn him for a bribe. It is possible that there may have been some one who did not sit as judge from the beginning, and who, nevertheless, condemned Oppianicus without having been bribed to do so. But if Falcula was innocent, I wish to know who was guilty? If he condemned him without being bribed to do so, who was bribed? I say that there has been nothing imputed to any one of these men which was not imputed to Fidiculanius; I say that there was nothing in the case of Fidiculanius which did not also exist in the case of the rest.

You must either find fault with this trial, the prosecution in which appeared to rely on previous decisions, or else, if you admit that this was an honest one, you must allow that Oppianicus was condemned without money having been paid to procure his condemnation. Although it ought to be proof enough for any one, that no one out of so many judges was proceeded against after Falcula had been acquitted.—For why do you bring up men convicted of bribery under a different law, the charges being well proved, the witnesses being numerous? when, in the first place, these very men ought to be accused of peculation rather than of bribery. For if, in trials for bribery, this was an hindrance to them, that they were being prosecuted under a different law, at all events it would have been a much greater injury to them to be brought before the court according to the law properly belonging to this offence.

In the second place, if the weight attached to this accusation was so great, that, under whatever law any one of those judges was prosecuted, he must be utterly ruined; then why, when there: are such crowds of accusers, and when the reward is so great, were not the others prosecuted too? On this, that case is mentioned, (which, however, has no right to be called a trial,) that an action for damages was brought against Publius Septimius Scaevola on that account; and what the practice is in cases of that sort, as I am speaking before men of the greatest learning, I have no need to occupy much time in explaining. For the diligence which is usually displayed in other trials, is never exercised after the defendant has been convicted.