For P. Sulla (55-57)

But there are letters of Faustus's extant, in which he begs and prays Publius Sulla to buy gladiators, and to buy this very troop: and not only were such letters sent to Publius Sulla, but they were sent also to Lucius Caesar, to Quintus Pompeius, and to Gains Memmius, by whose advice the whole business was managed. But Cornelius [*] was appointed to manage the troop. If in the respect of the purchase of this household of gladiators no suspicion attaches to the circumstances, it certainly can make no difference that he was appointed to manage them afterwards. But still, he in reality only discharged the servile duty of providing them with arms; but he never did superintend the men themselves; that duty was always discharged by Balbus, a freedman of Faustus.

But Sittius was sent by him into further Spain; in order to excite sedition in that province. In the first place, O judges, Sittius departed, in the consulship of Lucius Julius and Caius Figulus, some time before this mad business of Catiline's, and before there was any suspicion of this conspiracy. In the second place, he did not go there for the first time, but he had already been there several years before, for the same purpose that he went now. And he went not only with an object but with a necessary object having some important accounts to settle with the king of Mauritania. But then, after he was gone, as Sulla managed his affairs as his agent he sold many of the most beautiful farms of Publius Sittius, and by this means paid his debts; so that the motive which drove the rest to this wickedness, the desire, namely, of retaining their possessions, did not exist in the case of Sittius, who had diminished his landed property to pay his debts.

But now, how incredible, how absurd is the idea that a man who wished to make a massacre at Rome, and to burn down this city, should let his most intimate friend depart, should send him away into the most distant countries! Did he so in order the more easily to effect what he was endeavoring to do at Rome, if there were seditions in Spain?—“But these things were done independently, and had no connection with one another.” Is it possible, then, that he should have thought it desirable, when engaged in such important affairs, in such novel and dangerous, and seditious designs, to send away a man thoroughly attached to himself, his most intimate friend, one connected with himself by reciprocal good offices and by constant intercourse? It is not probable that he should send a way, when in difficulty, and in the midst of troubles of his own raising, the man whom he had always kept with him in times of prosperity and tranquillity.