[101]
When this news
was brought to him, he for a while was alarmed and agitated; he turned the blunt end
of his pen 1 on to his
tablets, and by so doing he overturned the whole of his cause. For he left himself
nothing which could be defended by any means whatever. For if he were to urge in his
defence, “It is lawful to take a charge against an absent man, no law
forbids this being done in a province,” he would seem to be putting forth
a faulty and worthless defence, but still it would be some sort of a defence.
Lastly, he might employ that most desperate refuge, of saying, that he had acted
ignorantly; that he had thought that it was lawful. And although this is the worst
defence of all, still he would seem to have said something. He erases that from his
tablets which he had put down, and enters “that the charge was brought
against Sthenius while he was present.”
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1 To turn the pen was to erase what had been written “At one end the stilus was sharpened to a point for scratching the characters on the wax, while the other end, being fat and circular served to render the surface of the tablets smooth again, and so to obliterate what had been written. Thus vertere stilum means to erase, and hence to correct”—Smith, Dict. Ant. in v. ...
M. Tullius Cicero. The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, literally translated by C. D. Yonge. London. George Bell & Sons. 1903.
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