[42]
I am not now complaining of the injustice
of the law, but I am showing that your conduct is at variance with the
spirit of the law; and I not only should not complain of the severity of
that proceeding, if you had acted as the senate intended and as the people
decreed, and had proposed to him as judges his own tribe, and those which he
had paid attentions to; but, if you had given him those men as judges who
ought also to have served as witnesses, I should think him acquitted at
once. And even now my opinion is not very different. For when you proposed
these tribes, you showed plainly that you preferred having judges who were
unknown rather than such as were known; you evaded the intention of the law;
you discarded every principle of justice; you preferred enveloping the case
in obscurity to throwing light upon it. “The Voltinian tribe was
corrupted by him.” “He had bought the Terentian
tribe.”
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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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