subject to have them all disproved. I think we may take it for granted that the property of the murdered man was divided as he tells us.
If that was so, why should any accusation have been made? Our Sextus seems to have been too much crushed by the dangers of his position to have attempted to get back any part of his father's wealth. He had betaken himself to the protection of a certain noble lady, one Metella, whose family had been his father's friends, and by her and her friends the defence was no doubt managed. "You have my farms," he is made to say by his advocate; "I live on the charity of another. I abandon everything because I am placid by nature, and because it must be so. My house, which is closed to me, is open to you: I endure it. You have possessed yourself of my whole establishment; I have not one single slave. I suffer all this, and feel that I must suffer it. What do you want more? Why do you persecute me further? In what do you think that I shall hurt you? How do I interfere with you? In what do I oppose you? Is it your wish to kill a man for the sake of plunder? You have your plunder. If for the sake of hatred, what hatred can you feel against him of whose land you have taken possession before you had even known him?"[65] Of all this, which is the advocate's appeal to pity, we may believe as little as we please. Cicero is addressing the judge, and desires only an acquittal. But the argument shows that no overt act in quest of restitution had as yet been made. Nevertheless, Chrysogonus feared such action, and had arranged with the two Tituses that something should be done to prevent it. What are we to think of the condition of a city in which not only could a man be murdered for his wealth walking home from supper—that, indeed, might happen in London if there existed the means of getting at the man's money when the man was dead—but in which such a plot could be concerted in order that the robbery might be consummated? "We have murdered the man and taken his money under the false plea that his goods had been confiscated. Friends, we find, are interfering—these Metellas and Metelluses, probably. There is a son who is the natural heir. Let us say that he killed his own father. The courts of law, which have only just been reopened since the dear days of proscription, disorder, and confiscation, will hardly yet be alert enough to acquit a man in opposition to the Dictator's favorite. Let us get him convicted, and, as a parricide, sewed up alive in a bag and thrown into the river"—as some of us have perhaps seen cats drowned, for such was the punishment—"and then he at least will not disturb us." It must have thus been that the plot was arranged.
It was a plot so foul that nothing could be fouler; but not the less was it carried out persistently with the knowledge and the assistance of many. Erucius, the accuser, who seems to have been put forward on the part of Chrysogonus, asserted that the man had caused his father to be murdered because of hatred. The father was going to disinherit the son, and therefore the son murdered the father. In this there might have been some probability, had there been any evidence of such an intention on the father's part. But there was none. Cicero declares that the father had never thought of disinheriting his son. There had been no quarrel, no hatred. This had been assumed as a reason—falsely. There was in fact no cause for such a deed; nor was it possible that the son should have done it. The father was killed in Rome when, as was evident, the son was fifty miles off. He never left his farm. Erucius, the accuser, had said, and had said truly, that Rome was full of murderers.[66] But who was the most likely to have employed such a person: this rough husbandman, who had no intercourse with Rome, who knew no one there, who knew little of Roman ways, who had nothing to get by the murder when committed, or they who had long been concerned with murderers, who knew Rome, and who were now found to have the property in their hands?
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