Pro A. Cluentio

For they and I thought it suitable to our humanity to uphold the cause of a man not entirely a stranger to us, while it was undecided, though suspicious; but to endeavour to upset the decision which had been come to, we should have thought a deed of great impudence. Accordingly he, being compelled by his desolate condition and necessity, fled for aid to the brothers Cepasii, industrious men, and of such a disposition as to think it an honour and a kindness to have any opportunity of speaking afforded them. Now this is a very shameful thing, that in diseases of the body, the more serious the complaint is, the more carefully is a physician of great eminence and skill sought for; but in capital trials, the worse the case is, the more obscure and unprincipled is the practitioner to whom men have recourse.

The defendant is brought before the court; the cause is pleaded; Canutius says but little in support of the accusation, it being a case, in fact, already decided. The elder Cepasius begins to reply, in a long exordium, tracing the facts a long way back. At first his speech is listened to with attention. Oppianicus began to recover his spirits, having been before downcast and dejected. Fabricius himself was delighted. He was not aware that the attention of the judges was awakened, not by the eloquence of the man, but by the impudence of the defence. After he began to discuss the immediate facts of the case, he himself aggravated considerably the unfavourable circumstances that already existed. Although he pleaded with great diligence, yet at times he seemed not to be defending the man, but only quibbling with the accusation. And while he was thinking that he was speaking with great art, and when he had made up this form of words with his utmost skill, “Look, O judges, at the fortunes of the men, look at the uncertainty and variety of the events that have befallen them, look at the old age of Fabricius;”—when he had frequently repeated this “Look,” for the sake of adorning his speech, he himself did look, but Caius Fabricius had slunk away from his seat with his head down.