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. 
 However, to return to my original subject: What decision did you—you, I say, who mention those
 trials— think ought to have bean come to at the time that Fidiculanius was acquitted? At least you think that the decision was not a corrupt one. 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.