1But if, judges, we cannot obtain from Chrysogonus that he be content with our money and not seek our life, if he cannot be induced, when he has taken from us everything that was our own, not to desire to snatch away this light as well, which is common to all, if he does not think it enough to sate his greed with money unless blood is also offered to his cruelty, then one refuge, judges, one hope is left to Sextus Roscius, the same as to the commonwealth: your old goodness and compassion. 1If that remains, we can be saved even now; 1but if the cruelty which has been rife in the commonwealth at this time makes your minds too — a thing which surely cannot happen — harder and more bitter, it is all over, judges; 1it is better to spend one's life among wild beasts than to live amid such enormous savagery.
151Is it for this that you have been kept, for this that you have been chosen, to condemn those whom the buyers of goods and the assassins had not been able to butcher? 151Good generals are accustomed to do this when they join battle: they station soldiers in the place where they judge the enemy's flight will be, so that any who flee from the battle line may fall upon them unexpectedly. 151No doubt in the same way these buyers of goods suppose that you, men of such character, sit here to catch those who have escaped from their hands. 151May the gods forbid, judges, that this body, which our ancestors wished to be called the public council, should be thought a garrison for the buyers of goods!
152Or do you not understand, judges, that nothing else is being pursued but that the children of the proscribed should be removed by any means whatever, and that the beginning of this is being sought in your oath and in Sextus Roscius' peril? 152Is it doubtful to whom the crime belongs, when you see on one side a buyer of goods, an enemy, an assassin, and the same man now the accuser, and on the other side a needy man, a son approved by his family, on whom not only no guilt but not even suspicion could fasten? 152Do you see anything else here standing in Roscius' way except that his father's goods have been sold?