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

Oh, but the whole senate judged that that tribunal had been bribed. How so? It undertook the cause. Could it pass over with indifference a matter of that sort when reported to it? When a tribune of the people, having stirred up the multitude, had almost brought the matter to a trial of strength; when a most virtuous citizen and most innocent man was said to have been unjustly condemned through the influence of money; when the whole body of senators was exceedingly unpopular, was it possible for no edict to be issued? Was it possible for all that excitement of the multitude to be disregarded without extreme danger to the republic? But what was decreed? How justly, how wisely, how diligently was it decreed? “If there are any men by whose agency the public court of justice was corrupted.” Does the senate appear here to decide that any such thing was really done? or rather to be exceedingly angry and indignant if such a thing was done? If Aulus Cluentius himself were asked his opinion about the courts of justice he would express no other sentiments than those which they expressed, by whose sentences you say that Aulus Cluentius was condemned. [137] But I ask of you whether Lucius Lucullus, the consul, a very wise man, passed that law according to that resolution of the senate? I ask whether Marcus Lucullus and Caius Cassius passed that law, against whom, when they were the consuls elect, the senate passed the very same resolution? They did not pass it. And that which you assert to have been brought about by Habitus's money, though you do not confirm your assertion by even the very slightest circumstances of suspicion, was done in the first instance by the justice and wisdom of those consuls, in order that men might not think that what the senate had decreed for the purpose of extinguishing the flames of present unpopularity, might afterwards be referred to the people. The Roman people itself afterwards, which formerly when excited by the fictitious complaints of Lucius Quinctius, a tribune of the people, had demanded that thing and the proposal of that law, now being influenced by the tears of the son of Caius Junius, a little boy, rejected the whole law and the whole proposition with the greatest outcry and with the greatest eagerness. [138] From which that was easy to be understood which has been often said,—that as the sea, which by its own nature is tranquil, is often agitated and disturbed by the violence of the winds, so, too, the Roman people is, when left to itself, placable, but is easily roused by the language of seditious men, as by the most violent storm.