[121]
Therefore, O judges, I will not only prove what you are
already aware of, that the censorial animadversions, and the reasons given for them too, have
often been overturned by the votes of the Roman people, but that they have also been upset by
the judicial sentences of those men who, being on their oaths, were bound to give their
decisions with more scrupulousness and care. In the first place, O judges, in the case of many
defendants, whom the censors in their notes accused of having taken money contrary to the
laws, they were guided by their own conscientious judgment, rather than by the opinion
expressed by the censors. In the second place, the city praetors, who are bound by their oaths
to select only the most virtuous men to be judges, have never thought that the fact of a man's
having been branded with ignominy by the censors was any impediment to their making him a
judge.
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M. Tullius Cicero. The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, literally translated by C. D. Yonge, B. A. London. Henry G. Bohn, York Street, Covent Garden. 1856.
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