Must I needs make a long speech on the topics of peculation, or of burning the registers? of
 which charge Caius Curtius, a relation of Caius Rabirius, was most honourably acquitted, as was
 due to his virtue, by a most illustrious bench of judges. But Rabirius himself not only was
 never prosecuted on either of these charges, but never fell under any the very slightest
 suspicion of them; nor was any such idea ever breathed by any one. Or must I be careful to reply
 to what has been said touching his sister's son? who, you said, had been murdered by him, as he
 sought an excuse for putting off the trial on the pretext of a domestic calamity. For what is
 more natural than that his sister's husband should be dearer to him than his sister's son? and
 so much dearer; that he would deprive the one of life in a most cruel manner, in order to gain a
 two days' adjournment of his trial for the other? Or need I say much respecting the detention of
 another man's slaves contrary to the Fabian law, or of the scourging and putting to death of
 Roman citizens, contrary to the Porcian law, when Caius Rabirius is honoured with the zeal
 displayed in his behalf by all Apulia , and by the
 eminent good-will of the state of Campania ; and when
 not only individuals, but I may almost say whole nations, have flocked hither to deliver him
 from danger, brought up from a greater distance than his name as a neighbour of theirs on their
 borders required? For why need I prepare a long speech on that point when it is set down in the
 count which assesses the damages, that he had regard to neither his own chastity nor to that of
 others? Moreover, I suspect that it was on that account that I
 was limited by Labienus to half an hour, in order that I might not be able to say much on this
 question of chastity. Therefore, you perceive that this half-hour is too long for me to discuss
 those charges which especially require the care of an advocate. 
 That other part about the death of Saturninus, you wished to be too short and narrow for my
 requirements; and it is one which requires and stands in need, not so much of the ingenuity of
 an orator, as of the authority of a consul. For as for the
 trial for treason, which, when you accuse me, you say has been put an end to by me, that is a
 charge against me; and not against Rabirius. And I wish, O Romans, that I was the first or the
 only person, who had abolished that in this republic. I wish that that, which he brings forward
 as a charge against me, might be an evidence of my peculiar glory. For what can be desired by
 any one which I should prefer to being said in my consulship to have banished the executioner
 from the forum, and the gallows from the Campus? But that credit belongs, in the first instance,
 O Romans, to our ancestors, who, after the kings had been expelled, did not choose to retain any
 vestige of kingly cruelty among a free people; and in the second instance, to many gallant men,
 who thought it fit that your liberty should not be an unpopular thing from the severity of the
 punishments with which it was protected but that it should be defended by the lenity of the
 laws. Which, then, of us, O Labienus, is attached to the best interests of the people? you who think
 that an executioner and chains ought to be put in operation against Roman citizens in the very
 assembly of the people; who order a gallows to be planted and erected for the execution of
 citizens in the Campus Martius , in the comitia centuriata in a place hallowed by the auspices, or I, who
 forbid the assembly to be polluted by the contagion of an executioner who think that the forum
 of the Roman people ought to be purified from all such traces of nefarious wickedness who urge
 that the assembly ought to be kept pure, the campus holy, the person of every Roman citizen
 inviolate, and the rights of liberty unimpaired?