M. Tullius Cicero, For Lucius Murena
C. D. Yonge, Ed.

“Many men went to meet him as he was departing from his province, when he was a candidate for the consulship.” That is a very usual thing to do. Who is there whom people do not go out to meet on his return home? “What a number of people they were.” In the first place, if I am not able to give you any exact account of it what wonder is it if many men did go out to meet such a man on his arrival, being a candidate for the consulship? If they had not done so, it would have appeared much more strange. [69] What then? Suppose I were even to add, what there would be nothing unusual in, that many had been asked to go? Would that be matter of accusation, or at all strange, that in a city in which we, when we are asked, often come to escort the sons of even the lowest rank, almost before the night is over, from the furthest part of the city, men should not mind going at the third hour into the Campus Martius, especially when they have been invited in the name of such a man as Murena? What then? What if all the societies had come to meet him, of which bodies many are sitting here as judges? What if many men of our own most honourable order had come? What then? What if the whole of that most officious body of candidates, which will not suffer any man to enter the city except in an honourable manner, had come, or even our prosecutor himself—if Postumius had come to meet him with a numerous crowd of his dependents? What is there strange in such a multitude? I say nothing of his clients, his neighbours, his tribesmen, or the whole army of Lucullus, which, just at that time, had come to Rome to his triumph; I say this, that that crowd, paying that gratuitous mark or respect was never backward in paying respect not only to the merit of any one, but even to his wishes. [70]

“But a great many people followed him.” Prove that it was for hire, and I will admit that that was a crime: but if the fact of hire be absent, what is there that you object to?