Pro L. Flacco

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.