Pro A. Cluentio

But I, if I said anything of that sort, did not mention it as a thing within my own knowledge, nor did I state it in evidence; and that speech was prompted rather by the occasion, than by my judgment and deliberate intention. For when I was acting as accuser, and had proposed to myself at the beginning to rouse the feelings of the Roman people and of the judges; and as I was mentioning all the errors of the courts of justice, relying not on my own opinion, but on the common report of men; I could not pass over that matter which had been so universally discussed. But whoever thinks that he has my positive opinions recorded indelibly in those orations which we have delivered in the courts of justice, is greatly mistaken. For all those speeches are speeches of the cause, and of the occasion, and are not the speeches of the men or of the advocates themselves. For if the causes themselves could speak for themselves, no one would employ an orator. But, as it is, we are employed, in order to say, not things which are to be considered as asserted on our own authority, but things which are derived from the circumstances of the cause itself.

They say that that able man, Marcus Antonius, was accustomed to say, “that he had never written a speech, in order that, if at any time he had said anything which was not desirable, he might be able to deny that he had said it.” Just as if whatever were said or pleaded by us was not retained in men's memories, if we did not ourselves commit it to writing. But I, with respect to speeches of that sort, am guided by the authority of many men, and especially of that most eloquent and most wise man, Lucius Crassus; who—when he was defending Lucius Plancius, whom Marcus Brutus, a man both vehement and able as a speaker, was prosecuting; when Brutus, having set two men to read, made them read alternate chapters out of two speeches of his, entirely contrary to one another, because when he was arguing against that motion which was introduced against the colony of Narbo, he disparaged the authority of the senate as much as he could, but when he was urging the adoption of the Servilian law, he extolled the senate with the most excessive praises; and when he had read out of that oration many things which had been spoken with some harshness against the Roman knights, in order to inflame the minds of those judges against Crassus—is said to have been a good deal agitated.