Pro A. Cluentio

Oppianicus, while lying concealed in his own house, is dragged out by Manilius; Avilius the informer is produced on the other side to face him. Why need you inquire what followed? Most of you are acquainted with Manilius; he had never from the time he was a child, had any thoughts of honour, or of the pursuit of virtue, or even of the advantage of a good character; but from having been a wanton and profligate buffoon, he had, in the dissensions of the state, arrived through the suffrages of the people at that office, to the seat of which he had often been conducted by the reproaches of the bystanders. Accordingly he arranges the business with Oppianicus; he receives a bribe from him; he abandons the cause after it was commended, and when it was fully proved. And in this trial of Oppianicus the crime committed on Asinius was proved by many witnesses, and also by the information of Avilius; in which, it was notorious that Oppianicus's name was mentioned first among the agents; and yet you say that he was an unfortunate and an innocent man, convicted by a corrupt tribunal.

What more? Did not your father, O Oppianicus, beyond all question, murder your grandmother Dinea, whose heir you are? who, when he had brought to her his own physician, a well-tried man and often victorious, (by whose means indeed he had slain many of his enemies,) exclaimed that she positively would not be attended by that man, through whose attention she had lost all her friends. Then immediately he goes to a man of Ancona, Lucius Clodius, a travelling quack, who had come by accident at that time to Larinum, and arranges with him for four hundred sesterces, as was shown at the time by his account-books. Lucius Clodius, being a man in a hurry, as he had many more market towns to visit, did the business off-hand, as soon as he was introduced; he took the woman off with the first draught he gave her, and did not stay at Larinum a moment afterwards.