1.
If, O Vatinius, I had chosen to regard merely what the unworthiness of your
character deserved, I should have treated you in a way that
would have been very pleasing to these men, and, as your evidence could not,
on account of the infamy of your life and the scandal of your private
conduct, be possibly considered of the slightest consequence, I should have
dismissed you without saying a single word to you. For not one of these men
considered it worth my while either to refute you, as if you were an
adversary of any importance, or to question you, as if you were a scrupulous
witness. But I was, perhaps, a little more intemperate just now than I
should have been. For from detestation of you, in which, although, on
account of your wicked conduct to me, I ought to go beyond all men, yet I am
in fact surpassed by everybody, I was carried away so far, that though I did
not despise you at all less than I detest you, still I chose to dismiss you
in embarrassment and distress, rather than in contempt.
[2]
Wherefore, that you may not wonder at my
having paid you this compliment of putting questions to you, whom no one
thinks worthy of being spoken to or visited, whom no one thinks deserving of
a vote, or of the rights of a citizen, or even of the light of life; know
that no motive would have induced me to do so, except that of repressing
that ferocity of yours, and crushing your audacity, and checking your
loquacity by entangling it in the few questions I should put to you. In
truth, you ought, O Vatinius, even if you had become suspected by Publius
Sestius undeservedly, still to pardon me, if, on the occasion of such great
danger to a man who has done me such great services, I had yielded to the
consideration of what his necessities required, and what his inclination
deserved of me.
[3]
But you unintentionally
showed a few moments ago that you spoke falsely in the evidence which you
gave yesterday, when you asserted that you had never had the least
conversation with Albinovanus, not only about the prosecution of Sestius,
but about anything whatever; and yet you said just now that Titus Claudius
had been in communication with you, and had asked your advice with respect
to the conduct of the prosecution against Sestius, and that Albinovanus, who
you had said before was hardly known to you, had come to your house, and had
held a long conversation with you. And lastly, you said that you had given
to Albinovanus the written harangues of Publius Sestius, which he had never
had any knowledge of, and did not know where to find, and that
they had been read at this trial. And by one of these statements you
confessed that the accusers had been instructed and suborned by you; and by
the other you confessed your own inconsistency, liable to the double charge
of folly and of perjury; when you stated that the man who you had previously
said was an entire stranger to you, had come to your house, and that you had
given the documents which he asked for to aid him in his accusation to a man
whom you had from the beginning considered a trickster and a prevaricator.
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