M. Tullius Cicero, Speech before Roman Citizens on Behalf of Gaius Rabirius, Defendant Against the Charge of Treason
William Blake Tyrrell, Ed.

[10] The charge concerning the condemnation for treason, which you keep accusing me of having abolished, is directed against me, not Rabirius. Would that I, Roman citizens, had been the first or the only man to have abolished that condemnation from this Republic! Would that this deed, which Labienus maintains is a charge against me, were testimony to my praises and no other's! What possible wish would I rather be granted than I, in my consulship, abolished the executioner from the forum and the cross from the Campus Martius? But that praise falls first to our ancestors, Roman citizens, who expelled the kings, and, afterwards, did not retain a trace of kingly savagery among a free people, and, secondly, to the many brave men who did not want your freedom to be unsafe from the severity of its punishments but fortified by the leniency of its laws.