For A. Cluentius (21-25)

The woman having lost her children, when the hope of recovering one of her sons was held out to her, summoned all her relations, and all the intimate friends of her son, and with tears entreated them to undertake the business to seek out the youth, and to restore to her that son whom fortune had willed should be the only one remaining to her out of many. Just when she had begun to adopt these measures, she was taken ill. Therefore she made a will in these terms: she left to that son four hundred thousand sesterces; and she made that Oppianicus who has been already mentioned, her grandson, her heir. And a few days after, she died. However, these relations, as they had undertaken to do while Dinea was alive, when she was dead, went into the Gallic territory to search out Aurius, with the same man who had brought Dinea the information.

The feelings, not only of his relations, but also of all the citizens of Larinum, are moved by hatred of Oppianicus, and pity for that young man. Therefore, when Aulus Aurius, he who had previously made this declaration, began to follow the man with loud cries and with threats, he fled from Larinum, and betook himself to the camp of that most illustrious man, Quintus Metellus.

After that flight, the witness of his crime, and of his consciousness of it, he never ventured to commit himself to the protection of a court of justice, or of the laws,—he never dared to trust himself unarmed among his enemies; but at the time when violence was stalking abroad, after the victory of Lucius Sulla, he came to Larinum with a body of armed men, to the great alarm of all the citizens; he carried off the quatuorviri, [*] whom the citizens of that municipality had elected; he said that he and three others had been appointed by Sulla; and he said that he received orders from him to take care that that Aurius who had threatened him with prosecution and with danger to his life, and the other Aurius, and Caius Aurius his son, and Sextus Vibius, whom he was said to have employed as his agent in corrupting the man who had given the information, were proscribed and put to death. Accordingly, when they had been most cruelly murdered, the rest were ale thrown into no slight fear of proscription and death by that circumstance. When these things had been made manifest at the trial, who is there who can think it possible that he should have been acquitted?