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These schoolmasters were also sometimes teachers of eloquence, lecturing to men. But Cicero, when he was praetor, and at the very height of his fame, is said to have attended his lectures. This was the year in which he delivered the very finest of his non-political speeches, his defence of Cluentius. He must have been a very clever teacher from whom so great an orator hoped to learn something.
The point discussed was the merit of the oration for Cluentius, as descriptive, first, of the genius of the speaker; and, secondly, of the manners of the times. Pleyel laboured to extenuate both these species of merit, and tasked his ingenuity, to shew that the orator had embraced a bad cause; or, at least, a doubtful one.
We have heard how Cicero made his way over to Sicily, creeping in a little boat through the dangers prepared for him, in order that he might get up the evidence against Verres. In defending Aulus Cluentius when he was Prætor, Cicero must have found the work to have been immense. In preparing the attack upon Catiline it seems that every witness was brought to himself.
The Romans, though they shed blood like water in their civil strife, were singularly lenient in their punishments. Not long afterwards he died. His widow saw in his death an opportunity of gratifying the unnatural hatred which she had long felt for her son Cluentius. She would accuse him of poisoning his step-father. Her first attempt failed completely.
The famous tigress of the story of Cluentius, Sassia, as she appears in Cicero's defence of him, was beyond doubt a criminal of the worst kind, however much we may discount the orator's rhetoric; and her case proves that the evil did not exist only at Rome, but was to be found even in a provincial town of no great importance. Divorce was so common as to be almost inevitable.
In the year 66 B.C. a very strange trial took place in the Court of Poison Cases. A certain Cluentius was accused of having poisoned his step-father, Oppianicus, and various other persons. Cluentius and his step-father were both natives of Larinum, a town in Apulia, where there was a famous temple of Mars.
"The least suspicion of the guilt of Cluentius would have brought him as a witness against him. Instead of doing this he gives him his support. Read," said Cicero to the clerk, "read his evidence. And you, sir," turning to the father, "stand up a while, if you please, and submit to the pain of hearing what I am obliged to relate. I will say no more about the case.
Mnestheus' keen oarsmen drive the swift Dragon, Mnestheus the Italian to be, from whose name is the Memmian family; Gyas the huge bulk of the huge Chimaera, a floating town, whom her triple-tiered Dardanian crew urge on with oars rising in threefold rank; Sergestus, from whom the Sergian house holds her name, sails in the tall Centaur; and in the sea-coloured Scylla Cloanthus, whence is thy family, Cluentius of Rome.
Other descriptions are longer and more ambitious; the confusion of the Catilinarian conspirators after detection; the character of Catiline; the debauchery of Antony in Varro's villa; the scourging and crucifixion of Gavius; the grim old Censor Appius frowning on Clodia his degenerate descendent; the tissue of monstrous crime which fills page after page of the Cluentius.
This done, he told the whole matter to his master the physician, and the physician told it again to his patient. Cluentius arranged that certain friends should be present in concealment at the interview between the slave and his tempter. The villain came, and was seized with the poison and a packet of money, sealed with his master's seal, upon him.
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