As for Calidius, I will only state this in answer to you, which I saw myself. That Quintus Metellus Pius, when consul, at the comitia for the election of praetors, for which office Quintus Calidius was standing, addressed supplications to the Roman people, and did not hesitate—though he was consul at the time, and a man of the very highest rank—to call him his patron and the patron of his most noble family. [70]
And now I ask of you whether you think that, if Calidius had been on his trial, Metellus Pius, if he had been able to be at Rome, or his father, if he had been alive, would have done for him what I am doing on the trial of Cnaeus Plancius? I wish, indeed, that the misfortune of Opimius could be eradicated from men's memories. But it is to be considered as a wound inflicted on the republic, as a disgrace to this empire, as the infamy of the Roman people, and not as a judicial verdict. For what more terrible blow could those judges—if indeed they deserve to be called judges, and not parricides of their country—inflict on the republic, than they did when they drove that man out of the state, who as praetor had delivered the republic from a war waged against it by its neighbours, and as consul, from one carried on against it by its own citizens?