Pro S. Roscio Amerino

42 CICERO
his confidence in tlie honour of tlie nian to whom he trusted
himself ? Moreover, we must punish most severely those
offences against which it is most difiicult to be forearmed.
We can be reserved in our dealings with strangers ; but our
intimate friends must necessarily have a clearer view of
much of our conduct: yet how can we be on our guard
against a partner ? Why, even if we fear him we break
the law of moral duty. Consequently, our ancestors were
quite right in considering that the man who had cheated liis
partner ought not to be reckoned among honourable men.
117. But the fact is that Titus Eoscius has not cheat^d
merely one partner in money concerns (an offence which
despite its serious nature is, I think, in some degree endurable),
but nine gallant gentlemen, who were his partneru
in the same duty, embassy, service, and commission, he
took in, defrauded, abandoned, handed over to their enemies,
and imposed upon with every kind of deceit and treachery
and they were men who could harboTir no suspicion of his
guilty purpose, who had no right to be afraid of their
partner in a service, who failed to see his chicanery, who
believed in his empty speeches. Thus it is that to-day
those honourable gentlemen, owing to his crafty stratagems,
are thought to have shown insufiicient cautiousness and
foresight ; while he who at the beginning was a traitor
and subsequently a deserter, who first of all divulged his
partners' plans to their enemies, and subsequently joined in
a conspiracy with those very enemies—he, I say, still intimidates
and threatens us, in all the glory of his three
estates, that is, the wages of his crime.
It is in a life of this sort, gentlemen, in the midst of this
long series of scandalous deeds, that you will find this crime
too with which the present trial is concerned.
118. For surely you ought to put the question to yourselves
in this way : where you see many rapacious, many
reckless, many abandoned, many treacherous acts, there,
amidst that array of scaudals, you may beheve some guilty
offence too lies concealed. Tliough indeed this act is far
from lying concealed; why, it is so self-evident and obtrusive
that not only can this deed be inferred from those crimes
with which it is admitted his character is stained, but from