1Now, Erucius, I come to you. 1You must agree with me, if this crime concerns my client, that either he did it with his own hand, which you deny, or through some free men or slaves. 1Free men? 1you cannot show how he could meet them, or by what means he induced them, or where, or through whom, or with what hope or at what price. 1I on the other hand show not only that Sextus Roscius did none of these things but that he could not even have done them, because he had not been in Rome for many years and never left his farms without good reason. 1There seemed to remain for you the heading of slaves, where you could take refuge as if in a harbour, driven back from your other suspicions; 1there you strike a rock of such a kind that you see not only that the charge rebounds from my client but realise that all suspicion falls back on yourselves.
80What, then, is it that the accuser has nevertheless fled to, for lack of arguments? 80'The times were such,' he says, 'that men were killed everywhere with impunity; 80so you were able to do this with no trouble because of the great number of assassins.' 80Sometimes, Erucius, you seem to me to want to gain two things for one fee: to give us a dousing with a prosecution, and to accuse the very men from whom you took your fee. 80What do you say? 80men were killed everywhere? 80Through whose agency, and by whom? 80Do you not reflect that you were brought here by the buyers at the auctions? 80What then?
80Do we not know that in those times the same men, for the most part, were cutters-up of both necks and estates? 81In short, will those who then ran about armed day and night, who were constantly in Rome, who at all times were busy with plunder and bloodshed, throw up against Sextus Roscius the cruelty and injustice of that time, and imagine that the host of assassins, of whom they themselves were the leaders and chiefs, will be a charge against him? 81he who not only was not in Rome but knew nothing at all of what was being done in Rome, because, as you yourself admit, he stayed constantly in the country.
82I fear, judges, that I may either weary you or seem to distrust your intelligence if I discuss such obvious matters at greater length. 82Erucius' whole accusation, I think, has been demolished; 82unless perhaps you are waiting for me to refute what he alleged about embezzlement and fictitious matters of that kind, things unheard of by us before this time, and new; 82which he seemed to me to be declaiming from another speech that he was preparing against another defendant; 82so they had nothing to do either with the charge of parricide or with the man who is on trial; 82and since he made those charges in a word, a word is enough to deny them.
82If there is anything he is keeping back for the witnesses, there too, as in the case itself, he will find us better prepared than he thought.