strike the parricide at once out of the system of nature, by depriving him of air, light, water, and earth, so that he who had destroyed the author of his existence might be excluded from those elements whence all things derived their being. He was not thrown to wild beasts, lest their ferocity should be augmented by the contagion of such guilt—he was not committed naked to the stream, lest he should contaminate that sea which washed away all other pollutions. Everything in nature, however common, was accounted too good for him to share in; for what is so common as air to the living, earth to the dead, the sea to those who float, the shore to those who are cast up. But the parricide lives so as not to breathe the air of heaven, dies so that the earth cannot receive his bones, is tossed by the waves so as not to be washed by them, so cast on the shore as to find no rest on its rocks.” This declamation was received with shouts of applause by the audience; yet Cicero, referring to it in subsequent works, calls it the exuberance of a youthful fancy, which wanted the control of his sounder judgment, and, like all the compositions of young men, was not applauded so much on its own account, as for the promise it gave of more improved and ripened talents(314). This pleading is also replete with severe and sarcastic declamation on the audacity of the Roscii, as well as the overgrown power and luxury of Chrysogonus; the orator has even hazarded an insinuation against Sylla himself, which, however, he was careful to palliate, by remarking, that through the multiplicity of affairs, he was obliged to connive at many things which his favourites did against his inclination. Cicero’s courage in defending and obtaining the acquittal of Roscius, under the circumstances in which the case was undertaken, was applauded by the whole city. By this public opposition to the avarice of an agent of Sylla, who was then in the plenitude of his power, and by the energy with which he resisted an oppressive proceeding, he fixed his character for a fearless and zealous patron of the injured, as much as for an accomplished orator. The defence of Roscius, which acquired him so much reputation in his youth, was remembered by him with such delight in his old age, that he recommends to his son, as the surest path to true honour, to defend those who are unjustly oppressed, as he himself had done in many causes, but particularly in that of Roscius of Ameria, whom he had protected against Sylla himself, in the height of his authority(315).