[48]
Therefore, when, a few years after this present of the freedom of the city, a
very important and strenuously-contested question arose concerning the
rights of citizenship according to the previsions of the Licinian and Mucian
law, was any prosecution instituted against any one of those
men of the federate states who had had the freedom of the city conferred on
him? For Titus Matrinius, of Spoletum, one of those men whom Caius Marius
had presented with the freedom of the city, was indeed prosecuted, being a
man of a Latin colony, which was among the first for vigour and high
character. And when Lucius Antistius, a very eloquent man, prosecuted him,
he never said that the people of Spoletum had not ratified the deed of
Marius; for he saw that states were accustomed to ratify laws which
concerned their own rights, not those which affected ours. But as colonies
had not been established by the law of Appuleius, by which law Saturninus
had carried, in favour of Marius, a proposition that he should have
authority to make three Roman citizens in every colony, he said that this
power which was so granted could have no validity, since the case for which
it had been intended to provide did not exist.
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M. Tullius Cicero. The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, literally translated by C. D. Yonge, B. A. London. George Bell & Sons, York Street, Covent Garden. 1891.
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