e story, we feel that very much depends on the
character of this man, and we are aware that our only description of him
comes from his own advocate. Cicero would probably say much which,
though beyond the truth, could not be absolutely refuted, but would
state as facts nothing that was absolutely false. Cicero describes him
as a middle-aged man, who never left his farm, doing his duty well by
his father, as whose agent he acted on the land--a simple, unambitious,
ignorant man, to whom one's sympathies are due rather than our
antipathy, because of his devotion to agriculture. He was now accused of
having murdered his father. The accusation was conducted by one Erucius,
who in his opening speech--the speech made before that by Cicero--had
evidently spoken ill of rural employments. Then Cicero reminds him, and
the judges, and the Court how greatly agriculture had been honored in
the old days, when Consuls were taken from the ploughs. The imagination,
however, of the reader pictures to itself a man who could hardly have
been a Consul at any time--one silent, lonely, uncouth, and altogether
separate from the pleasant intercourses of life. Erucius had declared of
him that he never took part in any festivity. Cicero uses this to show
that he was not likely to have been tempted by luxury to violence. Old
Roscius had had two sons, of whom he had kept one with him in Rome--the
one, probably, whose society had been dearest to him. He, however, had
died, and our Roscius--Sextus Roscius Amerinus, as he came to be called
when he was made famous by the murder--was left on one of the farms down
in the country. The accusation would probably not have been made, had he
not been known to be a man sullen, silent, rough, and unpopular--as to
whom such a murder might be supposed to be credible.

Why should any accusation have been made unless there was clear evidence
as to guilt? That is the first question which presents itself. This son
received no benefit from his father's death. He had in fact been
absolutely beggared by it--had lost the farm, the farming utensils,
every slave in the place, all of which had belonged to his father, and
not to himself. They had been taken, and divided; taken by persons
called "Sectores," informers or sequestrators, who took possession of
and sold--or did not sell--confiscated goods. Such men in this case had
pounced down upon the goods of the murdered man at once and swallowed
them all up, not leaving an acre