_Pro Sext. Roscio_. In the year following that in which he pleaded the case of Quintius, Cicero undertook the defence of Roscius of Ameria, which was the first public or criminal trial in which he spoke. The father of Roscius had two mortal enemies, of his own name and district. During the proscriptions of Sylla, he was assassinated one evening at Rome, while returning home from supper; and, on pretext that he was in the list proscribed, his estate was purchased for a mere nominal price by Chrysogonus, a favourite slave, to whom Sylla had given freedom, and whom he had permitted to buy the property of Roscius as a forfeiture. Part of the valuable lands thus acquired, were made over by Chrysogonus to the Roscii. These new proprietors, in order to secure themselves in the possession, hired Erucius, an informer and prosecutor by profession, to charge the son with the murder of his father, and they, at the same time, suborned witnesses, in order to convict him of the parricide. From dread of the power of Sylla, the accused had difficulty in prevailing on any patron to undertake his cause; but Cicero eagerly embraced this opportunity to give a public testimony of his detestation of oppression and tyranny. He exculpates his client, by enlarging on the improbability of the accusation, whether with respect to the enormity of the crime charged, or the blameless character and innocent life of young Roscius. He shows, too, that his enemies had completely failed in proving that he laboured under the displeasure of his father, or had been disinherited by him; and, in particular, that his constant residence in the country was no evidence of this displeasure—a topic which leads him to indulge in a beautiful commendation of a rural life, and the ancient rustic simplicity of the Romans. But while he thus vindicates the innocence of Roscius, the orator has so managed his pleading, that it appears rather an artful accusation of the two Roscii, than a defence of his own client. He tries to fix on them the guilt of the murder, by showing that they, and not the son, had reaped all the advantages of the death of old Roscius, and that, availing themselves of the strict law, which forbade slaves to be examined in evidence against their masters, they would not allow those who were with Roscius at the time of his assassination, but had subsequently fallen into their own possession, to be put to the torture. The whole case seems to have been pleaded with much animation and spirit, but the oration was rather too much in that florid Asiatic taste, which Cicero at this time had probably adopted from imitation of Hortensius, who was considered as the most perfect model of eloquence in the Forum; and hence the celebrated passage on the punishment of parricide, (which consisted in throwing the criminal, tied up in a sack, into a river,) was condemned by the severer taste of his more advanced years. “Its intention,” he declares, “was to