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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.
These four were, the man who had publicly threatened him, two of his kinsfolk, and one of the instruments of his own villainies, whom he now found it convenient to get out of the way. The story of the crimes of Oppianicus, of which only a small part has been given, having been finished, Cicero related the true circumstances of his death.
The iniquities of Verres, as a public officer who had the power of blessing or of cursing a whole people, were very terrible; but they do not shock so much as the story here told of private life. That any man should have lived as did Oppianicus, or any woman as did Sassia, seems to prove a state of things worse than anything described by Juvenal a hundred and fifty years later.
In defending his client, Cicero relied as much upon the terrible list of crimes which had been proved against the dead Oppianicus as upon any thing else. Terrible indeed it was, as a few specimens from the catalogue will prove. Among the wealthier inhabitants of Larinum was a certain Dinaea, a childless widow. Her only daughter, who had been married to Oppianicus, was also dead.
At Larinum, a town of new burgesses and favourable to Marian views, one Statius Albius Oppianicus, who had fled to Sulla's headquarters to avoid a charge of murder, made his appearance after the victory as commissioner of the regent, deposed the magistrates of the town, installed himself and his friends in their room, and caused the person who had threatened to accuse him, along with his nearest relatives and friends, to be outlawed and killed.
They had found the man, but he was dead. Oppianicus dared not face the burst of rage which this news excited, and fled from Larinum. But he was not at the end of his resources. There he represented himself as one who had suffered for the party. Metellus had himself fought in the Social War, and fought against the side to which the murdered prisoner belonged.
Adultery and incest had become familiar excitements. Boys of ten years old had learnt the art of poisoning their fathers, and the story of Aurelia Orestilla and Catiline had been rehearsed a few years before by Sassia and Oppianicus at Larino.
There had been a suspicion perhaps more than a suspicion of foul play in the trial which had ended in the condemnation of Oppianicus. The defendant, men said, might have attempted to bribe the jury, but the plaintiff had certainly done so. It would be a fine thing if he were to be punished even by finding him guilty of a crime which he had not committed.
The patient refused the man's services; they had been fatal, she said, to all her kinsfolk. Oppianicus then contrived to introduce to her a traveling quack from Ancona. He had bribed the man with about seventeen pounds of our money to administer a deadly drug.
Oppianicus returned to Larinum with an armed force, deposed the magistrates whom the towns-people had chosen, produced Sulla's mandate for the appointment of himself and three of his creatures in their stead, as well as for the execution of four persons particularly obnoxious to him.
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