lacrimis defendi: this was a peculiarly Roman custom. Many a desperate case was gained in the Roman courts by putting on mourning and bringing out the wife and children of the accused in deep mourning and bathed in tears. Not long after this trial, which ended in Milo's conviction, he was tried again in his absence for bribery (ambitus) and illegal combinations (de sodaliciis), and on a second charge of assault (de vi), and was condemned on each count. Cicero sent him a copy of his labored defence, and received a reply drily thanking him for his effort, but expressing satisfaction that the speech was not delivered; "For then," said he, "I should not now be eating the excellent mullets of Marseilles." In the Civil War, Milo perished in South Italy while leading the remnant of his troop of gladiators in resistance to Caesar, - "hit with a stone from the wall" in an assault on the town of Cosa in Lucania (see Caesar, Bellum Civile, iii, 22).
This text is part of:
Select Orations of. Cicero. Allen and Greenough's Edition. Revised by J. B. Greenough and G. L. Kittredge, with a special vocabulary by J. B. Greenough.
The National Endowment for the Humanities provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.