Pro A. Cluentio

Therefore, O judges, I will not only prove what you are already aware of, that the censorial animadversions, and the reasons given for them too, have often been overturned by the votes of the Roman people, but that they have also been upset by the judicial sentences of those men who, being on their oaths, were bound to give their decisions with more scrupulousness and care. In the first place, O judges, in the case of many defendants, whom the censors in their notes accused of having taken money contrary to the laws, they were guided by their own conscientious judgment, rather than by the opinion expressed by the censors. In the second place, the city praetors, who are bound by their oaths to select only the most virtuous men to be judges, have never thought that the fact of a man's having been branded with ignominy by the censors was any impediment to their making him a judge.

And lastly, the censors themselves have very often not adhered to the decisions, if you insist on their being called decisions, of former censors. And even the censors themselves consider their own decisions to be of only so much weight, that one is not afraid to find fault with, or even to rescind the sentence of the other; so that one decides on removing a man from the senate, the other wishes to have him retained in it, and thinks him worthy of the highest rank. The one orders him to be degraded to the rank of an aerarian [*](Aerarii were those citizens of Rome who did not enjoy the perfect franchise. They had to pay the aes militare, and to remove a citizen in the enjoyment of the full franchise into the list of those who enjoyed a less complete one, was of course a degradation and a punishment.) or to be entirely disfranchised; the other forbids it. So that how can it occur to you to call those judicial decisions which you see constantly rescinded by the Roman people, repudiated by judges on their oaths, disregarded by the magistrates, altered by those who have the same power subsequently conferred on them, and in which you see that the colleagues themselves repeatedly disagree?