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

Oh, but they visited Habitus himself with their censure. Not for any baseness, nor for any, I will not say vice, but not even for any fault of his own in his whole life. For no one can possibly be a more religious man, or a more honourable one, or more scrupulous in fulfilling all his duties. Nor indeed does the opposite party say anything to the contrary, but they adopt the same report of the judges having been bribed. Nor indeed have they any contrary opinion to that which we wish to be entertained about his modesty, integrity, and virtue; but they thought it quite impossible for the accuser to be passed over after the judges had been punished. And with respect to this whole business, if I produce one precedent from the whole of our ancient history, I will say no more. [134] For I think that I ought not to pass over the instance of that most eminent and most illustrious man, Publius Africanus; who, when he was censor, and when Caius Licinius Sacerdos had appeared on the register of the knights, said with a loud voice, so that the whole assembly could hear him, that he knew that he had committed deliberate perjury and that if any one denied it, he would give him his own evidence in support of this assertion. But when no one ventured to deny it, he ordered him to give up his horse. ¹ So that he, with whose decision the Roman people and foreign nations had been accustomed to content themselves, was not content with his own private knowledge as justifying him in branding another with ignominy. But if Habitus had been allowed to do this, he would have found it an easy matter to have resisted those very judges themselves, and the false suspicion, and the odium excited in the breasts of the people against him. [135] There is still one thing which especially perplexes me, and a topic to which I appear to have scarcely made any sufficient reply,—namely, the eulogy which you read, extracted from the will of Caius Egnatius, the father, a most honourable man, and a most wise one; saying that he had disinherited his son, because he had taken a bribe to vote for the condemnation of Oppianicus. Of that man's inconstancy and feebleness I will not say another word. This very will which you are reading is such, that he, when he was disinheriting that son whom he hated, was joining with his other son whom he loved, the most perfect strangers as his coheirs. But I think that you, O Attius, should consider carefully, whether you wish the decision of the censors, or that of Egnatius, to carry most weight with it. If that of Egnatius, that is a trifling thing which the censors have expressed in their notes about the others; for they expelled Egnatius himself from the senate, whom you wish to be considered an authority. If that of the censors is to preponderate, then the censors when they expelled his father, retained this Egnatius in the senate, whom his father disinherited on account of the note which the censors had written respecting him.