1This seemed so outrageous to the people of Ameria that there was weeping and lamentation throughout the whole town. 1For many things at once were passing before their eyes: the most cruel death of a most prosperous man, Sextus Roscius, and the most undeserved poverty of his son, to whom this wicked robber had not left, out of so great a patrimony, even a right of way to his father's tomb, the shameful purchase of the property, the occupation, the thefts, the plundering, the gifts. 1There was no one who would not rather have seen everything burn than see Titus Roscius swaggering and lording it over the property of Sextus Roscius, an excellent and most honourable man.
25And so a decree of the town councillors is at once passed that the ten leading men should set out to Lucius Sulla and inform him what kind of man Sextus Roscius had been, complain of the crime and wrongs of these men, and beg him to be willing to preserve both the good name of the dead man and the fortunes of his innocent son. 25And now, please, hear the decree itself. 25THE DECREE OF THE TOWN COUNCILLORS. 25The envoys come to the camp. 25It becomes clear, judges, as I have already said, that these crimes and outrages were being committed without the knowledge of Lucius Sulla. 25For at once Chrysogonus both approaches them himself and sends men of noble birth to ask them not to go to Sulla, and to promise that Chrysogonus would do everything they wished.
26He had become so thoroughly afraid that he would rather have died than that Sulla should be informed about these matters. 26Men of the old school, who imagined others to be like their own nature, believed him when he assured them that he would remove the name of Sextus Roscius from the lists and hand over the farms vacant to the son, and when Titus Roscius Capito, who was among the ten envoys, guaranteed that it would be so; 26they returned to Ameria with their plea unspoken. 26And at first these men began to put the matter off and delay from day to day, then, somewhat more slowly, to do nothing and to make fools of them, and finally, as was easily understood, to lay a plot against the life of this Sextus Roscius, thinking that they could no longer keep another man's fortune while its owner was unharmed.