and the old style of public trials.  For your tribunal to-day is girt with no such audience as was wont; this is no ordinary crowd that hems us in.  Yon guards whom you see on duty in front of all the temples, though set to prevent violence, yet still do a sort of violence to the pleader; since in the Forum and the count of justice, though the military force which surrounds us be wholesome and needful, yet we cannot even be thus freed from apprehension without looking with some apprehension on the means.  And if I thought they were set there in hostile array against Milo, I would yield to circumstances, gentlemen, and feel there was no room for the pleader amidst such a display of weapons.  But I am encouraged by the advice of a man of great wisdom and justice—­of Pompey, who surely would not think it compatible with that justice, after committing a prisoner to the verdict of a jury, then to hand him over to the swords of his soldiers; nor consonant with his wisdom to arm the violent passions of a mob with the authority of the state.  Therefore those weapons, those officers and men, proclaim to us not peril but protection; they encourage us to be not only undisturbed but confident; they promise me not only support in pleading for the defence, but silence for it to be listened to.  As to the rest of the audience, so far as it is composed of peaceful citizens, all, I know, are on our side; nor is there any single man among all those crowds whom you see occupying every point from which a glimpse of this court can be gained, looking on in anxious expectation of the result of this trial, who, while he approves the boldness of the defendant, does not also feel that the fate of himself, his children, and his country, hangs upon the issue of to-day”.

After an elaborate argument to prove that the slaying of Clodius by Milo was in self-defence, or, at the worst, that it was a fate which he well deserved as a public enemy, he closes his speech with a peroration, the pathos of which has always been admired: 

“I would it had been the will of heaven—­if I may say so with all reverence for my country, for I fear lest my duty to my client may make me say what is disloyal towards her—­I would that Publius Clodius were not only alive, but that he were praetor, consul, dictator even, before my eyes had seen this sight!  But what says Milo?  He speaks like a brave man, and a man whom it is your duty to protect—­’Not so—­by no means’, says he.  ’Clodius has met the doom he well deserved:  I am ready, if it must be so, to meet that which I do not deserve’. ...  But I must stop; I can no longer speak for tears; and tears are an argument which he would scorn for his defence.  I entreat you, I adjure you, ye who sit here in judgment, that in your verdict you dare to give utterance to what I know you feel”.