Just catching up on Cicero's Defense Speeches, a new translation by D.H. Berry from OWC. I just finished the first of five, Pro Roscio Amerino where the 26 year old Marcus Tullius Cicero first made a name for himself:QuoteThe next year [80] he undertook his first criminal case, Pro Roscio Amerino. This was a defence of a man, Sextus Roscius of Ameria, who had been charged with the murder of his father. The trial became sensational when Cicero boldly exposed the unscrupulous profiteering of one of Sulla's cronies, the freedman Chrysogonus, who was behind the prosecution; he won his case and became famous overnight.An interesting feature of the Roman legal system, was that individual plaintiffs acted as prosecutors, rather than petitioning the State to appoint a prosecutor. A strangely similar situation to the Court of Public Opinion of today.

Message from Cicero:Mr. Mandela, presumably, there is, somewhere in Iraq, an Arabic speaking Mandela-like political leader rotting in an Iraqi prison. Who will free him? You invoke the word holocaust. I am unclear as to a line of demaracation. But surely the 33 year old slaughter and Civil War in your own continent in the country of Sudan with 1.0M dead and 1.0M homeless is well on its way to being a holocaust. Who will free them?And what of the 35,000 Ethiopian Jews airlifted in 1984 and 1991 to Israel. Who freed them? If they had stayed and perished, would this have been a holocaust?In South Africa, during Apartheid, if the government had refused to free you and was torturing and murdering your countrymen, who would have freed you?And what of the thugs and murderers which plague your continent -- Mugabe is only one. Their citizens. Who will free them?