M. Tullius Cicero, For Aulus Cluentius
C. D. Yonge, Ed.

What was it, then, that influenced the censors? Even they themselves, if they were to allege the most serious reason that they could, would not say it was anything else beyond common conversation and report. They will say that they found out nothing by witnesses, nothing by documents, nothing by any important evidence, nothing, in short, from any investigation of the cause. If they had investigated it, still their sentence ought not to have been so fixed as to be impossible to be altered. I will not quote precedents, of which, however, there is an infinite number; I will not mention any old instance, or any powerful or influential man. Very lately, when I had defended an insignificant man, clerk to the aediles, Decius Matrinius, before Marcus Junius and Quintus Publicius, the praetors, and before Marcus Platorius and Caius Flaminius, the curule aediles, I persuaded them,—men sworn to do their duty,—to choose him for their secretary whom those same censors had made an aerarian; for as there was no fault found in the man, they thought that they ought to inquire what he deserved, and not what resolution had been come to respecting him. [127] For as for these things which they have stated in their notes, about corrupting the judges, who is there who believes that they were sufficiently ascertained or carefully inquired into by them? I see that a note was made by the censors respecting Marcus Aquillius and Titus Gutta;—what does this mean? Were those two the only men corrupted with bribes? What became of the rest? Did they, forsooth, condemn him for nothing? He, then, was not unfairly dealt with; he was not overwhelmed by means of bribes; it is not the case, as all these assemblies stirred up by Quinctius would have it, that all the men who voted against Oppianicus are to be imagined criminal, or at all events suspected. I see that two men alone are judged by the authority of the censors to have been implicated in that infamy; or else they must allege that there is something which they have found out concerning those two men which they have not found out respecting the others.