The Life of Cicero, Volume One

by Anthony Trollope

Why should any accusation have been made unless there was clear evidence as to guilt? That is the first question which presents itself. This son received no benefit from his father's death. He had in fact been absolutely beggared by it—had lost the farm, the farming utensils, every slave in the place, all of which had belonged to his father, and not to himself. They had been taken, and divided; taken by persons called "Sectores," informers or sequestrators, who took possession of and sold—or did not sell—confiscated goods. Such men in this case had pounced down upon the goods of the murdered man at once and swallowed them all up, not leaving an acre or a slave to our Roscius. Cicero tells us who divided the spoil among them. There were two other Rosciuses, distant relatives, probably, both named Titus; Titus Roscius Magnus, who sojourned in Rome, and who seems to have exercised the trade of informer and assassin during the proscriptions, and Titus Roscius Capito, who, when at home, lived at Ameria, but of whom Cicero tells us that he had become an apt pupil of the other during this affair. They had got large shares, but they shared also with one Chrysogonus, the freedman and favorite of Sulla, who did the dirty work for Jupiter Optimus Maximus when Jupiter Optimus Maximus had not time to do it himself. We presume that Chrysogonus had the greater part of the plunder. As to Capito, the apt pupil, we are told again and again that he got three farms for himself.

Again, it is necessary to say that all these facts come from Cicero, who, in accordance with the authorized practice of barristers, would scruple at saying nothing which he found in his instructions. How instructions were conveyed to an advocate in those days we do not quite know. There was no system of attorneys. But the story was probably made out for the "patronus" or advocate by an underling, and in some way prepared for him. That which was thus prepared he exaggerated as the case might seem to require. It has to be understood of Cicero that he possessed great art and, no doubt, great audacity in such exaggeration; in regard to which we should certainly not bear very heavily upon him now, unless we are prepared to bear more heavily upon those who do the same thing in our own enlightened days. But Cicero, even as a young man, knew his business much too well to put forward statements which could be disproved. The accusation came first; then the speech in defence; after that the evidence, which was offered only on the side of the accuser, and which was subject to cross-examination. Cicero would have no opportunity of producing evidence. He was thus exempted from the necessity of proving his statements, but was 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?

The two slaves who had been with the old man when he was killed, surely they might tell something? Here there comes out incidentally the fact that slaves when they were examined as witnesses were tortured, quite as a matter of course, so that their evidence might be extracted. This is spoken of with no horror by Cicero, nor, as far as I can remember, by other Roman writers. It was regarded as an established rule of life that a slave, if brought into a court of law, should be made to tell the truth by such appliances. This was so common that one is tempted to hope, and almost to suppose that the "question" was not ordinarily administered with circumstances of extreme cruelty. We hear, indeed, of slaves having their liberty given them in order that, being free, they may not be forced by torture to tell the truth;[67] but had the cruelty been of the nature described by Scott in "Old Mortality," when the poor preacher's limbs were mangled, I think we should have heard more of it. Nor was the torture always applied, but only when the expected evidence was not otherwise forth-coming. Cicero explains, in the little dialogue given below, how the thing was carried on.[68] "You had better tell the truth now, my friend: Was it so and so?" The slave knows that, if he says it was so, there is the cross for him, or the "little horse;" but that, if he will say the contrary, he will save his joints from racking. And yet the evidence went for what it was worth.

In this case of Roscius there had certainly been two slaves present; but Cicero, who, as counsel for the defence, could call no witnesses, had not the power to bring them into court; nor could slaves have been made to give evidence against their masters. These slaves, who had belonged to the murdered man, were now the property either of Chrysogonus or of the two Tituses. There was no getting at their evidence but by permission of their masters, and this was withheld. Cicero demands that they shall be produced, knowing that the demand will have no effect. "The man here," he says, pointing to the accused, "asks for it, prays for it. What will you do in this case? Why do you refuse?"[69]

By this time the reader is brought to feel that the accused person cannot possibly have been guilty; and if the reader, how much more the hearer? Then Cicero goes on to show who in truth were guilty. "Doubt now if you can, judges, by whom Roscius was killed: whether by him who, by his father's death, is plunged into poverty and trouble—who is forbidden even to investigate the truth—or by those who are afraid of real evidence, who themselves possess the plunder, who live in the midst of murder, and on the proceeds of murder."[70]

Then he addresses one of the Tituses, Titus Magnus, who seems to have been sitting in the court, and who is rebuked for his impudence in doing so: "Who can doubt who was the murderer—you who have got all the plunder, or this man who has lost everything? But if it be added to this that you were a pauper before—that you have been known as a greedy fellow, as a dare-devil, as the avowed enemy of him who has been killed—then need one ask what has brought you to do such a deed as this?"[71]

He next tells what took place, as far as it was known, immediately after the murder. The man had been killed coming home from supper, in September, after it was dark, say at eight or nine o'clock, and the fact was known in Ameria before dawn. Travelling was not then very quick; but a messenger, one Mallius Glaucia, a man on very close terms with Titus Magnus, was sent down at once in a light gig to travel through the night and take the information to Titus Capito Why was all this hurry? How did Glaucia hear of the murder so quickly? What cause to travel all through the night? Why was it necessary that Capito should know all about it at once? "I cannot think," says Cicero, "only that I see that Capito has got three of the farms out of the thirteen which the murdered man owned!" But Capito is to be produced as a witness, and Cicero gives us to understand what sort of cross-examination he will have to undergo.

In all this the reader has to imagine much, and to come to conclusions as to facts of which he has no evidence. When that hurried messenger was sent, there was probably no idea of accusing the son. The two real contrivers of the murder would have been more on their guard had they intended such a course. It had been conceived that when the man was dead and his goods seized, the fear of Sulla's favorite, the still customary dread of the horrors of the time, would cause the son to shrink from inquiry. Hitherto, when men had been killed and their goods taken, even if the killing and the taking had not been done strictly in accordance with Sulla's ordinance, it had been found safer to be silent and to endure; but this poor wretch, Sextus, had friends in Rome—friends who were friends of Sulla—of whom Chrysogonus and the Tituses had probably not bethought themselves. When it came to pass that more stir was made than they had expected, then the accusation became necessary.