What will you do in this case?
Why do you refuse ?"[69] By this time the reader is brought to feel that the accused person cannot possibly have been guilty; and if the reader, how much more the hearer?
Then Cicero goes on to show who in truth were guilty.

"Doubt now if you can, judges, by whom Roscius was killed: whether by him who, by his father's death, is plunged into poverty and trouble--who is forbidden even to investigate the truth--or by those who are afraid of real evidence, who themselves possess the plunder, who live in the midst of murder, and on the proceeds of murder."[70] Then he addresses one of the Tituses, Titus Magnus, who seems to have been sitting in the court, and who is rebuked for his impudence in doing so: "Who can doubt who was the murderer--you who have got all the plunder, or this man who has lost everything?
But if it be added to this that you were a pauper before--that you have been known as a greedy fellow, as a dare-devil, as the avowed enemy of him who has been killed--then need one ask what has brought you to do such a deed as this ?"[71] He next tells what took place, as far as it was known, immediately after the murder.

The man had been killed coming home from supper, in September, after it was dark, say at eight or nine o'clock, and the fact was known in Ameria before dawn.

Travelling was not then very quick; but a messenger, one Mallius Glaucia, a man on very close terms with Titus Magnus, was sent down at once in a light gig to travel through the night and take the information to Titus Capito Why was all this hurry?
How did Glaucia hear of the murder so quickly?
What cause to travel all through the night?
Why was it necessary that Capito should know all about it at once?
"I cannot think," says Cicero, "only that I see that Capito has got three of the farms out of the thirteen which the murdered man owned!" But Capito is to be produced as a witness, and Cicero gives us to understand what sort of cross-examination he will have to undergo.
In all this the reader has to imagine much, and to come to conclusions as to facts of which he has no evidence.

When that hurried messenger was sent, there was probably no idea of accusing the son.