1This fault, then, is disgraceful for this reason, that it violates two most sacred things, friendship and good faith. 1For hardly anyone gives a commission except to a friend, or trusts anyone except one whom he thinks faithful. 1It is the mark of a thoroughly abandoned man, therefore, at once to break up a friendship and to deceive one who would not have been harmed if he had not trusted. 113Is that so? 113in the smallest matters the man who neglects a commission must be condemned in a most disgraceful trial; in a matter so great, when the man to whom the good name of the dead and the fortunes of the living were entrusted and committed has brought disgrace on the dead and destitution on the living, shall he be counted among honourable men, or indeed among the living at all?
113In the smallest private matters even negligence is brought into a charge of breach of commission and a trial involving infamy, because, if things are done rightly, it is the one who gave the commission who may be careless, not the one who accepted it; 113in a matter so great, which was transacted and entrusted publicly, the man who has not harmed some private interest through negligence, but has polluted and stained by his treachery the sanctity of the embassy itself, with what penalty, pray, will he be punished, or by what trial condemned? 114if Sextus Roscius had entrusted this matter to him privately, to settle and come to terms with Chrysogonus, and to pledge his own credit for that purpose if he thought it at all necessary, would not the man who had undertaken to do it, if he had turned even a little of that business to his own profit, be condemned by an arbiter, and both restore the money and lose all his good name?
115As it is, Sextus Roscius did not entrust this matter to him, but, what is much more serious, Sextus Roscius himself, with his reputation, his life and all his property, was entrusted publicly by the town councillors to Titus Roscius; 115and out of this Titus Roscius has not turned some little thing or other to his own profit, but has turned my client out of his property root and branch, has bargained three estates for himself, and has valued the wishes of the councillors and of all the townsmen at exactly as much as his own good faith.