, the accuser, who seems to have been put forward on the
part of Chrysogonus, asserted that the man had caused his father to be
murdered because of hatred. The father was going to disinherit the son,
and therefore the son murdered the father. In this there might have been
some probability, had there been any evidence of such an intention on
the father's part. But there was none. Cicero declares that the father
had never thought of disinheriting his son. There had been no quarrel,
no hatred. This had been assumed as a reason--falsely. There was in
fact no cause for such a deed; nor was it possible that the son should
have done it. The father was killed in Rome when, as was evident, the
son was fifty miles off. He never left his farm. Erucius, the accuser,
had said, and had said truly, that Rome was full of murderers.[66] But
who was the most likely to have employed such a person: this rough
husbandman, who had no intercourse with Rome, who knew no one there, who
knew little of Roman ways, who had nothing to get by the murder when
committed, or they who had long been concerned with murderers, who knew
Rome, and who were now found to have the property in their hands?

The two slaves who had been with the old man when he was killed, surely
they might tell something? Here there comes out incidentally the fact
that slaves when they were examined as witnesses were tortured, quite as
a matter of course, so that their evidence might be extracted. This is
spoken of with no horror by Cicero, nor, as far as I can remember, by
other Roman writers. It was regarded as an established rule of life that
a slave, if brought into a court of law, should be made to tell the
truth by such appliances. This was so common that one is tempted to
hope, and almost to suppose that the "question" was not ordinarily
administered with circumstances of extreme cruelty. We hear, indeed, of
slaves having their liberty given them in order that, being free, they
may not be forced by torture to tell the truth;[67] but had the cruelty
been of the nature described by Scott in "Old Mortality," when the poor
preacher's limbs were mangled, I think we should have heard more of it.
Nor was the torture always applied, but only when the expected evidence
was not otherwise forth-coming. Cicero explains, in the little dialogue
given below, how the thing was carried on.[68] "You had better tell the
truth now, my friend: Was it so and so?" The slave knows that, if he
says