1What singular wisdom, judges! 1Do they not seem to have removed and snatched this man from the whole of nature, taking from him at a stroke sky, sun, water and earth, so that he who had killed the one from whom he himself was born should lack all those things from which all things are said to be born? 1They did not want to throw his body to wild beasts, lest we should find even the beasts more savage for having touched so great a crime; 1nor to throw them naked into the river like that, lest, when they had been carried down to the sea, they should pollute the very element by which all other things that have been defiled are thought to be purified; 1in short, there is nothing so cheap or so common that they left them any share of it.
72For what is so common as breath to the living, earth to the dead, the sea to those tossed on the waves, the shore to those cast up? 72They live, while they can, in such a way that they cannot draw breath from the open sky; they die in such a way that the earth does not touch their bones; they are tossed by the waves in such a way that they are never washed clean; finally they are cast out in such a way that not even on the rocks can they rest in death. 72Do you think, Erucius, that you can prove to such men a charge of so great a crime, a crime for which so signal a punishment has been established, when you have not even put forward a motive for the crime?
72if you were accusing him before the buyers of the property themselves, and Chrysogonus were presiding over that court, you would still have come more carefully and better prepared. 73Do you not see what the case is, or before whom it is being tried? 73It is a case of parricide, which cannot be undertaken without many motives; 73and it is being tried before men of the greatest wisdom, who understand that no one commits even the smallest crime without a motive.