Pro L. Flacco

He says that he gave it as a contribution from Aulus Sextilius, and from his own brothers. Sextilius was able to give such a sum; as for his own brothers, they are partners in his beggary. Let us then hear what Sextilius says; then let his brothers themselves come forward; let them lie as shamelessly as they please, and let them say that they gave what they never possessed; still, perhaps, when they are produced face to face with us, they will say something in which they may be detected. “I have not brought Sextilius with me as a witness,” says he. Give me the accounts then. “I have not brought them down.” At least produce your brothers. “I never summoned them.” Are we then to fear as an accusation or as a piece of evidence, what Asclepiades by himself affirms, a man needy as to fortune, infamous as to character, condemned by every one's opinion, relying on his own impudence and audacity, without any account-books or any one to support his evidence?

He also said that the panegyric which we mentioned as having been given by the men of Aemon to Flaccus, is false; a panegyric, says he, which we ought to be glad to be without. For when that admirable representative of his city beheld the public seal, he said that his own fellow-citizens and all the rest of the Greeks were accustomed to seal at the moment whatever required it. Then take that panegyric to yourself. For the life and character of Flaccus do not depend on the evidence of the citizens of Aemon. For you grant to me, (an admission which this cause especially requires,) that there is no authority, no consistency, no firm wisdom in the Greeks, and, above all, no proper regard to truth in giving their evidence; unless, indeed, henceforward there is to be this distinction made between the evidence and your speech, that the cities are to be said to have allowed something to Flaccus when absent but are to appear to have neither written nor sealed anything suited to the occasion, so as to save Laelius, though he was present, though he himself undertook the management of the business himself, and though he alarmed them and threatened them, availing himself of the power of the law, of the privileges of a prosecutor, and of all his own private resources.

In truth, O judges, I have often seen important facts detected and discovered through mere trifles, as in the case of

Here, O judges, if I thought that you were influenced by the decrees of the Aemonensians, and by the letters of the rest of the Phrygians, I should cry out, and argue with all the vigour of which I was master. I should call to witness the publicans; I should invoke the traders; I should implore the aid of your own consciences: the wax being seen, I should feel sure that the audacious forgery of the whole evidence was evidently detected and discovered, and laid bare to you. But at present I will not triumph too violently, nor be too much elated at this, nor will I inveigh against that trifler as if he were a witness, nor will I allow myself to be moved at all with respect to any part of this testimony of the Aemonensians, whether it has been forged here, as appears likely on the face of it, or whether it can really been sent from Aemon, as it is said to have been. In truth, I will not fear the evidence of the men to whom I make over that panegyric, since, as Asclepiades says, they are utterly insignificant.

I come now to the evidence of the people of Dorylaeum, who, when they were brought into court said that they had lost their public documents near some caverns. O the shepherds (I know not who they were), the literary shepherds! if they took nothing from those men except the letters! But we suspect that there is some other reason, and that we should not think those men quite destitute of all cunning. There is, I imagine, a heavier penalty at Dorylaeum than among other people, for forging or tampering with written documents. If they had produced the genuine letters, there was no accusation in them; if they produced forged ones, there was a penalty for such an act. They thought the finest thing they could do was to say that they were lost.

Let them be quiet then, and allow me to set this down as so much gain, said to turn to something else. They will not allow me to do so. For some one or other gives them a lift, and says that he, as a private person, had given him money. But this cannot possibly be endured. He who reads things from those public documents which have been in the power of the prosecutor, ought not to carry any weight with him; but, nevertheless, a formal trial appears to take place when the documents themselves, of whatever character they may be, are produced. But when a man, whom not one of you has ever seen, whom no living mortal has ever heard of only says, “I gave,” will you hesitate, O judges, to save a most noble citizen from this most unknown of Phrygians? And this very man was lately disbelieved by three honourable and worthy Roman knights, when in a case in which a man's liberty was at stake, he said that the man who was claimed was his own kinsman. How has it come about that the man who was not considered a trustworthy witness as to his own blood and family is a credible authority concerning a public injury?

And when this Dorylaean was lately carried out to burial in the presence of a great multitude and numerous assembly of you, Laelius tried to excite odium against Lucius Flaccus by imputing his death to him. You are acting unjustly, O Laelius, if you think that it is our risk whether your comrades live or die; especially as I think that this instance proceeded from your own carelessness. For you gave a Phrygian, a man who had never seen a fig-tree, a whole basket of figs; and his death was to some extent a relief to you, for you lost a very voracious guest. But what good did it to Flaccus, as he was well enough till he came forward here, and who died after he had put out his sting and delivered his evidence? But that prop of your cause, Mithridates, was retained as a witness by us and examined two whole days; and, after he had said all that he wished, departed reproved, convicted, and broken down, and now walks about in a breastplate. That learned and sagacious man is afraid that Lucius Flaccus may burden himself with a crime, now that he cannot escape him as a witness; so that he, who, before the evidence was given, restrained himself when he might have got something by the deed, is likely now to add the guilt of an enormous crime to the charge of covetousness,

The principal man in stirring up all the Greeks,—he who is sitting with the prosecutors,—Heraclides of Temnos, a silly chattering fellow, but (in his own opinion) so learned, that he calls himself even their tutor, and so ambitious, that he salutes all of you and of us every day. Old as he is, he has not yet been able to get admission into the senate of Temnos; and he, the man who professes himself able to teach the art of speaking to others, has himself been convicted in some very discreditable trials.

Of similar good fortune was Nicomedes, who came with him as a deputy, who was not allowed to enter the senate on any terms, but had been convicted of theft, and of defrauding his partner. For Lysanias, the chief man of the deputation, obtained the rank of senator; but as he showed himself rather too much devoted to the riches of the republic, he was convicted of peculation, and lost his property and his title of senator. These three men tried to render the accounts of even our own treasury false. For they returned themselves as having nine slaves, when they had in reality come without one single companion. I see at the first framing of the decree Lysanias was present, he, whose brother's property was sold by public order during the praetorship of Flaccus, because he did not pay what he owed to the people. Besides him there is Philippus, the son-in-law of Lysanias; and Hermobius, whose brother also, by name Poles, was convicted of embezzling the public money.

These men say that they gave Flaccus and those who were with him fifteen thousand drachmas. I have to do with a most active city, and one which is an admirable hand at keeping its accounts; a city in which not a farthing can be disposed of without the intervention of five praetors, three quaestors, and four bankers, who are elected in that city by the burgesses. Of all that number not one has been brought hither as a witness; and when they return that money as having been given to Flaccus by name, they say that they gave him also a still larger sum, entered as having been given for the repair of a temple. But this is not a very consistent story; for either everything ought to have been kept secret or else everything ought to have been returned without any disguise. When they enter the money as having been given to Flaccus, naming him expressly, they fear nothing, they apprehend nothing. When they return the money as having been given for a public work, then all of a sudden those same men begin to be afraid of the very man whom they had despised before. If the praetor gave the money, as it is set down, he drew it from the quaestor, the quaestor from the public bank, the public bank derived it either from revenue or from tribute. All this will never be like a crime, unless you explain to me the whole business both with respect to the persons and to the accounts.

Or, as it is written in this same decree, that the most illustrious men of the city,—men who had had the highest honours of the state conferred on them,—were circumvented by him while he was praetor, why are they not present in court or why, at all events, are they not named in the decree? For I do not suppose that Heraclides, who is pricking up his head, is the person here intended. For is he one of the most eminent of the citizens, when Hermippus brought him here for trial? a man who did not even receive his present commission to come on this deputation from his fellow-citizens by their voluntary choice, but who went all the way from Tmolus to solicit it? a man on whom no honour was ever conferred in his own city; and the only business which ever has been entrusted to him, is one which is usually entrusted to the most insignificant people. He, in the praetorship of Titus Autidius, was appointed guardian of the public corn. And when he had received money from Publius Varinius the praetor for this purpose, he concealed it from his fellow-citizens, and charged the whole of the expense to them. And after this was made known and revealed at Temnos, by letters which were sent thither by Publius Varinius, and when Cnaeus Lentulus, he who was the censor, the patron of the people of Temnos, had sent letters on the same subject, no one ever afterwards saw that man Heraclides at Temnos.

And that you may be thoroughly aware of his impudence, listen, I entreat you, to the cause which excited the animosity of this most worthless man against Flaccus. He bought at Rome a farm in the district of Cyme, from a minor whose name was Meculonius. Having made himself out in words to be a rich man,—though he had in reality nothing beyond the stock of impudence which you