For A. Cluentius (186-190)

What do you say, O Titus Attius? will you bring before the court matter involving danger to a man's life, will you bring forward the information laid with respect to this wickedness, and the fortunes of another, all written down in this document, and yet refuse to name the author of this document, or the witness, or any one who will in any respect confirm it? And will such men as these judges, before whom we stand, approve of this destruction which you have drawn forth out of the mother's bosom against her most innocent son? Be it so then; these documents have no author. What next? Why is not the investigation itself reserved for the judges; for the friends and connections of Oppianicus, whom she had invited to be present before, and for this identical time? What was done to these men, Strato and Nicostratus?

I ask of you, O Oppianicus, what you say was done to your slave Nicostratus? whom you, as you were shortly about to accuse this man, ought to have taken to Rome, to have given him an opportunity of giving information; lastly, to have preserved him unhurt for examination, to have preserved him for these judges, and to have preserved him for this time. For, O judges, know that Strato was crucified, having had his tongue cut out; for there is no one of all the citizens of Larinum who does not know this. That frantic woman was afraid, not of her own conscience, not of the hatred of her fellow-citizens, not of the reports flying about among everybody; but, as if every one was not likely to be hereafter the witness of her wickedness, she was afraid of being convicted by the last words of a dying slave.

This is what I complain of first of all,—that wickedness which is now at length thoroughly revealed, of the poisoning of Fabricius; which, being then recent, was suspicious to others, incredible to him, but which now appears plain and evident to everybody. In fact, his mother is hardly concealed in that act of poisoning; nothing was devised by Oppianicus without the counsel of that woman; and unless that had been the case, certainly she would not afterwards, when the affair was detected, have departed from him as from a wicked husband, but she would have fled from him as from a most pitiless enemy, and she would have for ever left that house overflowing with every imaginable wickedness.

She not only did not do that, but from that time forth she omitted no opportunity of planning some treachery or other, but day and night, she, a mother, directed all her thoughts to compassing the destruction of her son. But first, in order to confirm Oppianicus in his resolution of becoming the accuser of her son, she bound him to her by gifts and presents, by giving him her daughter in marriage, and by the hope of her inheritance.