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 me in this manner—that there were now manifestly and undeniably no courts of justice at all. The very criminal who the day before thought that he was already condemned, is acquitted now that his defender has been made consul. What are we to think then? Will it avail nothing that all Sicily, all the Sicilians, that all the merchants who have business in that country, that all public and private documents are now at Rome? Nothing, if the consul-elect wills it otherwise. What! will not the judges be influenced by the accusation, by the evidence, by the universal opinion of the Roman people? No. Everything will be governed by the power and authority of one man.

In the meantime my comitia began to be held; of which that fellow thought himself the master, as he had been of all the other comitia this year. He began to run about, that influential man, with his son, a youth of engaging and popular manners, among the tribes. The son began to address and to call on all the friends of his father—that is to say, all his agents—for bribery; and when this was noticed and perceived, the Roman people took care with the most earnest good will that I should not be deprived of my honor through the money of that man, whose riches had not been able to make me violate my good faith. After that I was released from the great anxiety about my canvass, I began, with a mind much more unoccupied and much more at ease, to think of nothing and to do nothing ex-