Convicted of extorting a province he had in fact protected, Rutilius refused to plead for mercy, went into exile in the very province he was said to have robbed, and was received there as a guest of honour.
Rutilius Rufus was a Roman consul, soldier, jurist and historian, and a Stoic of the generation before Cicero. He served in Asia as deputy to the governor Quintus Mucius Scaevola, where the two of them curbed the Roman tax farmers who were bleeding the province.
The tax farming companies were drawn from the equestrian order, and at that moment the equestrians controlled the juries in the extortion court. In 92 BC Rutilius was prosecuted for extortion in Asia, the precise offence he had prevented. He was convicted.
What is remembered is how he conducted the defence. He would not have advocates plead for him in the ordinary tearful manner, would not appeal to pity, and would not compromise the case by pretending the court was legitimate. He stated the facts and let the verdict fall. Ancient writers treat the trial as a scandal that exposed the courts rather than the man.
He went to Asia, the province he had supposedly plundered, and was welcomed. Smyrna gave him citizenship; he lived there, wrote his memoirs and a history in Greek, and stayed. When Sulla later held power and it became possible to return, Rutilius did not go back. Cicero, who visited him in Smyrna as a young man, is one of the sources for the picture.
The conviction and the exile are solidly attested. The high moral colouring is more complicated: much of it comes from writers with reasons to make the equestrian juries look bad, and Roman sources are fond of turning any dignified defeat into a set piece. That he was welcomed by the province he was condemned for robbing is the fact that does most of the work, and it is not seriously disputed.
The reason he is here is not the injustice; injustice is common. It is what he did with the part that remained his. The verdict was not his, the jury was not his, his return was not his to arrange. His conduct in the courtroom and his choice not to come crawling back when the door opened were entirely his, and they are the reason anyone still knows his name.
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