1I for my part have both seen and heard of many men in this city — not only those who had tasted this kind of life with the tips of their lips and touched it, as the saying is, with their fingertips, but those who had given their whole youth over to pleasures — who at length emerged and, as the saying is, returned to good ways, and became serious and distinguished men. 1For by universal consent some play is allowed to this age, and nature herself pours forth the desires of youth. 1If these break out in such a way as to undermine no one's life and overturn no one's household, they are usually regarded as easy and tolerable.
29But you seemed to me to want to stir up some ill will against Caelius out of the general bad reputation of the young. 29And so all that silence which was granted to your speech arose for this reason, that while a single defendant was set before us, we were thinking about the vices of many. 29It is easy to accuse luxury. 29The day would fail me now if I tried to set out everything that can be said to that effect; 29on seduction, on adultery, on wantonness, on extravagance the speech is boundless. 29Even if you set before yourself no defendant but only those vices, the subject itself can still be accused fully and weightily.
29But it is for your wisdom, gentlemen, not to be led away from the defendant, and, when the prosecutor has pointed whatever stings your severity and gravity possess at the subject, at vices, at morals, at the times, not to launch them at the man and the defendant, when he has been brought into a kind of unjust hatred not by any crime of his own but by the vice of many. 30And so I do not venture to answer your severity as I ought. 30For it was my part to plead for the exemption of youth and to ask for indulgence. 30I do not, I say, venture to; 30I make no use of the refuges of youth, I give up the rights granted to all; 30I ask only this: that if there is at this time a general ill feeling about debt, insolence and the lusts of youth, which I see is great, nonetheless others' sins, the vices of his age and of the times, may not harm this man.
30And I, the same man who demands this, do not refuse to answer most carefully the charges which are brought against him in particular.