The report had reached the bench, that there was mention made of corruption being practiced among the judges;—the matter had not been kept as secret as it ought to have been, and yet was not so thoroughly detected as it was desirable that it should be for the sake of the republic. While the matter was so obscure, and every one in such doubt, on a sudden Canutius, a very clever man, and who had got some suspicion that Stalenus had been tampered with, but who thought that the business was not definitively settled, determined to set sentence pronounced. The judges said that they were willing. And at that time Oppianicus himself was in no great alarm. He thought that the whole business had been settled by Stalenus.

The judges who were to deliberate on the case were thirty-two in number: an acquittal would be obtained by the votes of sixteen of them. Forty thousand sesterces given to each judge ought to make up that number of votes, and then the vote of Stalenus himself, who would be induced by the hope of a greater reward still, would crown the whole, making the seventeenth. And it happened by chance, because the matter was concluded in this way on a sudden, that Stalenus himself was not present. He was acting as counsel for the defence in some cause or other before a judge. Habitus did not mind that, nor did Canutius. But Oppianicus and his patron Lucius Quinctius were not so well pleased; and as Lucius Quinctius was at that time a tribune of the people, he reproached Caius Junius the judge most bitterly, and insisted upon it that they should not deliberate on their decision without the presence of Stalenus, and as they appeared to be purposely rather careless in communicating with him on the subject by means of the lictors, he himself went out of the criminal court into the civil court, where Stalenus was engaged, and, as he had the power to do, adjourned that court, and himself brought Stalenus back to the bench.