guilty of no violence?  Did you not pitiably destroy Lentulus and his followers, who were not guilty, not tried, and not convicted, in spite of the fact that you are always and everywhere prating interminably about the laws and about the courts?  If any one should take these phrases from your speeches, there is nothing left.  You censured Pompey because he conducted the trial of Milo contrary to legalized precedent:  yet you afforded Lentulus no privilege great or small that is enjoined in these cases, but without a speech or trial you cast him into prison, a man respectable, aged, whose ancestors had given many great pledges that he would be friendly to his country, and who by reason of his age and his character had no power to do anything revolutionary.  What trouble did he have that would have been cured by the change of condition?  What blessing did he possess that would not certainly be jeopardized by rebellion?  What arms had he collected, what allies had he equipped, that a man who had been consul and was praetor should be so pitilessly and impiously cast into a cell without being allowed to say a word of defence or hear a single charge, and die there like the basest criminals?  For this is what this excellent Tullius most of all desired,—­that in [the Tullianum,] the place that bears his name, he might put to death the grandson of that Lentulus once became the head of the senate. [-21-] What would he have done if he had obtained authority to bear arms, seeing that he accomplished so many things of such a nature by his words alone?  These are your brilliant achievements, these are your great exhibitions of generalship; and not only were you condemned for them by the rest, but you were so ready to vote against your own self in the matter that you fled before your trial came on.  Yet what greater demonstration of your bloodguiltiness could there be than that you came in danger of perishing at the hands of those very persons in whose behalf you pretended you had done this, that you were afraid of the very ones whom you said you had benefited by these acts, and that you did not wait to hear from them or say a word to them, you clever, you extraordinary man, you aider of other people, but secured your safety by flight as if from a battle?  And you are so shameless that you have undertaken to write a history of these events that I have related, whereas you ought to have prayed that no other man even should give an account of any of them:  then you might at least derive this advantage, that your doings should die with you and no memory of them be transmitted to posterity.  Now, gentlemen, if you want to laugh, listen to his clever device.  He set himself the task of writing a history of the entire existence of the city (for he pretends to be a sophist and poet and philosopher and orator and historian), and he began not from the founding of it, like the rest are similarly busied, but from his own consulship, so that he might proceed backwards, making that the beginning of his account, and the kingdom of Romulus the end.