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.
 What connection had he with Habitus? None—nay rather, as he was a very intimate friend of
 Oppianicus, he was rather an enemy to Habitus. Did he then pick out that man whom he knew to be
 rather unfriendly to himself, and to be exceedingly intimate with Oppianicus, to be above all
 others the instrument of his own wickedness, and of the other's danger, In the next place, why
 do you, who have been prompted by pity to undertake this prosecution, leave this Asellius so
 long unpunished? Why did not you follow the precedent of Habitus, and have a previous
 examination, which should affect him, by means of an investigation into his conduct who had
 administered the poison? 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.
 When Oppianicus was wandering about as a vagabond and an exile, excluded from every quarter,
 he went into the Falernian district of Caius Quintilius; there he first fell sick, and had a
 very violent illness. As Sassia was with him, and as she was more intimate with a man of the
 name of Statius Albius, a citizen of that colony, a man in good health, who was constantly with
 her, than that most dissolute husband could endure, while his fortune was unimpaired, and as she
 thought that that chaste and legitimate bond of wedlock was dissolved by the condemnation of her
 husband, a man of the name of Nicostratus, a faithful slave of Oppianicus's, a man who was very
 curious and very truth-telling, is said to have been accustomed to carry a good many tales to
 his master. In the meantime, when Oppianicus was becoming convalescent, and could not endure any
 longer the profligacy of this Falernian, and after he had come nearer the city,—for he had some
 sort of hired house outside the gates,—he is said to have fallen from his horse, and, being a
 man in delicate health before, to have hurt his side very badly, and having come to the city in
 a state of fever, to have died in a few days. This is the manner of his death, O judges, such as
 to have no suspicious circumstance at ale attached to it, or if it has any, they must apply to
 some domestic wickedness carried on within his own walls.