Pro S. Roscio Amerino

PRO sEx. Roscio, §§ 67—72. 25
one would do tlie deed. He is said to have acted cleverly
in not making any enactment about a crime vrhicli had
not been committed before, lest he might appear not so
much to prevent as to suggest it. How much more wisely
our ancestors acted ! As they knew that there is nothing
so sacred that recklessness does not at times lay violent
hands upon it, they invented a unique punishment for
parricides, in order to deter from the crime by the enormity
of the punishment those whom nature unaided had not
been able to keep to their duty : they ordained that such
men should be sewn into a sack while still living, and cast
into running water.
71. A truly unique exampleof wisdom, gentlemen ! Do
they not seem to have taken, to have torn from the xmiverse
such a man, since on a sudden hey robbed him of
the heaven and the sun, and of water and earth, in order
that the man who had slain the author of his owu existence
might be without all those things from which all things
are said to have derived theu* existence ? They would not
throw the body to wild animals, lest we might find even
brute beasts more savage by contact with such an abomination
; they would not throw them naked as they were
into running water lest, when they had been cast into the
sea, they might defile that very element by which other
things that have been polluted are believed to be puj-ified
in a word, there was nothing worthless or common enough
for them to leave such men any particle of it.
72. Tet indeed what is so common as breath to living
men, earth to dead men, sea to those who are tossed in
the waves, the shore to those who have been cast ashore ?
They live while they can do so without being able to
breathe the air from the firmament. They die so that the
eai-th cannot cover their bones ; they are tossed in the
waves so that they can never be touched by them ; finally
they are thrown ashore so that they cannot rest even on
the rocks when dead. Do you think you can prove a
charge involving such a crime, a crime for which so unexampled
a penalty has been fixed ? do you think you can
establish it, Erucius, to the satisfaction of good men and
true like those, if you do not even bring forward a motive