[9]
That has happened through the
injustice and wrong-doing of the praetor; first, because, contrary to universal custom,
he has chosen that the trial as to honour or infamy 1 should take place before the one
concerning the fact; secondly, because he has so arranged this very trial, that the
defendant is compelled to plead his cause before he has heard a word of the accuser's;
and this has been done because of the influence and power of those men who indulge the
violence and covetousness of Sextus Naevius as eagerly as if their own property or
honour were at stake, and who make experiment of their influence in such matters as
this, in which the more weight they have through their virtue and nobility, the less
they ought to make a parade of what influence they have.
This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
M. Tullius Cicero. The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, literally translated by C. D. Yonge. London. George Bell & Sons. 1903.
The National Endowment for the Humanities provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.