[What This passage is an addition of Beier from a Milan MS. inserted in
the same way by Orellius. was the use of bringing forward foreign evidence,] when his
domestic life and his natural disposition was notorious? Therefore, I will not, O Decimus
Laelius, allow you to assume this law and this condition as applicable to yourself and to the
rest for the future, and to us at present; [so as to lay down a rule that we are to accommodate
our defences to the will of the prosecutors, and not come to those assertions to which our cause
of itself leads us.]
When you have branded his youth, when you have stigmatized the rest of his life with stains of
infamy, when you have brought forward the ruin of his private affairs and his disgrace in the
city, and his vices and crimes in Spain and Gaul and Cilicia, and Crete, in which provinces he
lived in no great obscurity, then we shall hear what the people of Tmolus and the Lorymeni think
of Lucius Flaccus. But the man whom so many and such influential provinces wish to be
saved,—whom many citizens from all parts of Italy defended, being bound to him by intimate
connection and old friendship,—whom this the common country of us all holds fast in her embrace,
on account of her fresh recollection of his great services,—him, even if all Asia demands him
for punishment, I will defend,—his enemies I will resist. What if it is not all Asia that
demands him, nor the best part of it nor even any part without bribery, nor of its own accord,
nor rightly, nor in a manner according to custom, nor with truth, nor with any conscientious
regard to justice or honesty? If it duly demands him because it has been persuaded, and tampered
with, and excited, and compelled to do so,—if it has backed this prosecution with its name
impiously, and rashly, and covetously, and with great inconsistency, speaking only by the mouth
of the most needy witnesses, and if the province itself has no grounds to complain with truth of
any injuries done by him; still, O judges, will these statements, heard with
reference to a very brief epoch diminish the credit due to actions which we really know,
extending over a long period of time?
I, therefore, as his defender, will preserve this order which his enemy avoids; and I will
pursue and follow up the prosecutor, and of my own accord I will demand the accusation from our
adversary. What is it, O Laelius? Have you at any time been able to stigmatize the youth of
Lucius Flaccus, who has passed his time, not in the shade, nor in the common pursuits and
training of those his age? In truth, even as a boy he went with his father, the consul, to the
wars; and yet, even as to this very fact you accused him of something because [something This passage is an addition of Beier from a Milan MS. inserted in the same way
by Orellius. appeared able to be said so as to excite suspicion.]
With what charges, then, O Laelius, do you attack my client being such a man as he is? He was
in Cilicia a military tribune when Publius Servilius was the general; not a word is said about
that. He was quaestor to Marcus Piso in Spain; not a word has been uttered about his
quaestorship. He was present at the greater part of the Cretan war, and went through all its
hardships in the company of that consummate general. The accusation is dumb with regard to this
period. His discharge of his duties as judge during his praetorship,—a business of great
intricacy, and affording numberless causes for suspicion and enmities, is not touched. Nay more,
though it fell in a most critical and perilous time of the republic, it is praised even by his
enemies. “Oh, but damaging evidence has been given against him.” Before I say by whom it was
given, by what hopes, by what violence, by what means the witnesses were urged on, and what
insignificant, needy, treacherous, audacious men they were, I will speak of their whole class,
and of the condition in which all of us are placed. In the name of the immortal gods, O judges,
will you ask of unknown witnesses in what way the man decided trials in Asia, who the year
before had sat as judge at Rome? And will you yourselves form no conjectures on the subject? In
a jurisdiction so various, many decrees were issued,—many desires of influential men were set at
nought; and yet, what words, (I will not say of suspicion, for that is often false, but) of
anger or indignation were ever once uttered against him?