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Of this nature is his justification of Rabirius in taking up arms against Saturninus; his account of the imprisonment of the Roman citizens by Verres, and of the crucifixion of Gavius; his comparison of Antony with Tarquin; and the contrast he draws of Verres with Fabius, Scipio, and Marius.
The accused was one Gaius Rabirius, who, if he had not killed Saturninus, had at least paraded with his cut-off head at the tables of men of rank, and who moreover was notorious among the Apulian landholders for his kidnapping and his bloody deeds.
Fresh from the defence of Rabirius, he showed how dangerous citizens, the Gracchi, Saturninus, Glaucia, had been satisfactorily killed when they were meditating mischief. He did not see that a constitution was already doomed when the ruling powers were driven to assassinate their opponents, because a trial with the forms of law would have ended in their acquittal.
Not only did he defend Rabirius Postumus, when accused by Cæsar of the assassination of Saturninus, and address the people against offering violence to L. Roscius on account of the unpopular lex theatralis, but he even resisted the restoration to their civil rights of the sons of the men proscribed by Sulla, avowedly on the ground of the necessity of maintaining the established order, though he knew and confessed the justice of the proposal.
The populace on seeing Otho enter the theatre, rose in a body and greeted him with hisses: a tumult ensued; Cicero was sent for; he summoned the people into an adjoining temple, and rebuked them with such sparkling wit as to restore completely their good humour. The next speech, which still remains to us, is a defence of the senator Rabirius; that on behalf of Calpurnius Piso is lost.
Candide, having been educated never to judge for himself, was much surprised at what he heard. Martin found there was a good deal of reason in Pococurante's remarks. "Oh! here is Cicero," said Candide. "Here is the great man whom I fancy you are never tired of reading." "I never read him," replied the Venetian. "What is it to me whether he pleads for Rabirius or Cluentius?
Process against Rabirius The mode in which the democracy dealt with the ancient criminal jurisdiction of the comitia was characteristic. It had not been properly abolished by Sulla, but practically the jury-commissions on high treason and murder had superseded it, and no rational man could think of seriously re-establishing the old procedure which long before Sulla had been thoroughly unpractical.
But in the dealings of Rome with foreign kings, these evils had often before arisen, and at last been made criminal; and while Gabinius was tried for treason, de majestate, for leading his army out of his province, Rabirius was tried, under the Lex Julia de pecuniis repetundis, for lending money and taking office under Auletes.
Abusing his authority as a magistrate, for party purposes, he tries to put to a cruel and ignominious death Rabirius, an aged and helpless man, for an act done in party warfare thirty years before. The case of Vettius is less clear, but Dr.
His father had been killed at the side of Saturninus and Glaucia thirty-seven years before, when the young lords of Rome had unroofed the senate-house, and had pelted them and their companions to death with tiles. One of the actors in the scene, Caius Rabirius, now a very old man, was still alive. Labienus prosecuted him before Caesar.
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