Pro A. Cluentio

Oh, but they visited Habitus himself with their censure. Not for any baseness, nor for any, I will not say vice, but not even for any fault of his own in his whole life. For no one can possibly be a more religious man, or a more honourable one, or more scrupulous in fulfilling all his duties. Nor indeed does the opposite party say anything to the contrary, but they adopt the same report of the judges having been bribed. Nor indeed have they any contrary opinion to that which we wish to be entertained about his modesty, integrity, and virtue; but they thought it quite impossible for the accuser to be passed over after the judges had been punished. And with respect to this whole business, if I produce one precedent from the whole of our ancient history, I will say no more.

For I think that I ought not to pass over the instance of that most eminent and most illustrious man, Publius Africanus; who, when he was censor, and when Caius Licinius Sacerdos had appeared on the register of the knights, said with a loud voice, so that the whole assembly could hear him, that he knew that he had committed deliberate perjury and that if any one denied it, he would give him his own evidence in support of this assertion. But when no one ventured to deny it, he ordered him to give up his horse. [*](“If the censors considered a knight unworthy of his rank, they struck him off of the list of knights, and deprived him of his horse, or ordered him to sell it, with the intention, no doubt, that the person thus degraded should refund to the state the money which had been advanced to him for its purchase. (Niebuhr, Hist. of Rome, vol. i. p. 433.)”—Smith, Dict. Ant. p. 895, v. Equites.) So that he, with whose decision the Roman people and foreign nations had been accustomed to content themselves, was not content with his own private knowledge as justifying him in branding another with ignominy. But if Habitus had been allowed to do this, he would have found it an easy matter to have resisted those very judges themselves, and the false suspicion, and the odium excited in the breasts of the people against him.