[137]
But I ask of you whether Lucius Lucullus, the consul, a very wise man,
passed that law according to that resolution of the senate? I ask whether Marcus Lucullus and
Caius Cassius passed that law, against whom, when they were the consuls elect, the senate
passed the very same resolution? They did not pass it. And that which you assert to have been
brought about by Habitus's money, though you do not confirm your assertion by even the very
slightest circumstances of suspicion, was done in the first instance by the justice and wisdom
of those consuls, in order that men might not think that what the senate had decreed for the
purpose of extinguishing the flames of present unpopularity, might afterwards be referred to
the people. The Roman people itself afterwards, which formerly when excited by the fictitious
complaints of Lucius Quinctius, a tribune of the people, had demanded that thing and the
proposal of that law, now being influenced by the tears of the son of Caius Junius, a little
boy, rejected the whole law and the whole proposition with the greatest outcry and with the
greatest eagerness.
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M. Tullius Cicero. The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, literally translated by C. D. Yonge, B. A. London. Henry G. Bohn, York Street, Covent Garden. 1856.
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