For A. Cluentius (171-175)

Did Habitus, then, envy the life of this men? If he had hated him bitterly and utterly, ought he not to have wished him to live as long as possible? Would an enemy have hastened his death, when death was the only refuge which he had left from his calamity? If the man had had any virtue or any courage, he would have killed himself, (as many brave men have done in many instances, when in similar misfortunes.) How is it possible for an enemy to have wished to offer to him what he must himself have wished for eagerly For now indeed, what evil has death brought him? Unless, perchance, we are influenced by fables and nonsense, to think that he is enduring in the shades below the punishments of' the wicked, and that he has met with more enemies there than he left behind here; and that he has been driven headlong into the district and habitation of wicked spirits by the avenging furies of his mother-in-law, of his wife, of his brother, and of his children. But if these stories are false, as all men are well aware that they are, what else has death taken from him except the sense of his misery? Come now, by whose instrumentality was the poison administered? By that of Marcus Asellius.

But now, as for that circumstance of poison being administered in bread, how improbable, how unusual, how strange a thing it is. Was it easier than administering it in a cup? Could it be hid more secretly in some part of the bread than if it had been all liquefied and amalgamated with a potion? Could it pass more rapidly into the veins and into every separate part of the body if it were eaten than if it were drunk? Could it escape notice (if that was thought of) more easily in bread, than in a cup, when it might then have been so mixed up as to be wholly impossible to be separated?

“But he died by a sudden death.” But if that was the case, still that circumstance, from the number of men who die in that way, would not give rise to any well-grounded suspicion of poison. If it were a suspicious circumstance, still the suspicion would apply to others rather than to Habitus. But as to that fact itself, men tell most impudent lies. And that you may see this, listen to this statement of the truth respecting his death, and how after his death an accusation was sought for out of it against Habitus, by his mother.