Imperium

Roll VII

WE LEFT ROME ON the Ides of January, on the last day of the Festival of the Nymphs, Cicero riding in a covered wagon so that he could continue to work-although I found it a torment trying even to read, let alone write, in that rattling, lurching carruca. It was a miserable journey, freezing cold, with snow flurries across the higher ground. By this time most of the crosses bearing the crucified rebel slaves had been removed from the Appian Way. But some still stood as a warning, stark against the whitened landscape, with a few rotted fragments of bodies attached. Gazing at them, I felt as if Crassus’s long arm had reached out after me from Rome and once again pinched my cheek.

Because we had departed in such a hurry, it had proved impossible to arrange places to stay all along our route, and on three or four nights when no inns were available we were reduced to sleeping by the roadside. I lay with the other slaves, huddled around the campfire, while Cicero, Lucius, and young Frugi slept in the wagon. In the mountains I would wake at dawn to find my clothes starched with ice. When at last we reached the coast at Velia, Cicero decided it would be quicker to board a ship and hug the coast-this, despite the risk of winter storms and pirates, and his own marked aversion to traveling by boat, for he had been warned by a Sibyl that his death would somehow be connected with the sea.

Velia was a health resort, with a well-known temple to Apollo Oulius, then a fashionable god of healing. But it was shuttered now and out of season, and as we made our way down to the harbor-front, where the gray sea battered the wharf, Cicero remarked that he had seldom seen a less enticing holiday spot. In the port, aside from the usual collection of fishing boats, was moored one huge vessel, a cargo ship the size of a trireme, and while we were negotiating our journey with the local sailors, Cicero asked to whom it belonged. It was, we were told, a gift from the citizens of the Sicilian port of Messana to their former governor Gaius Verres, and had been moored here for a month.

There was something infinitely sinister about that great ship, sitting low in the water, fully crewed and ready to move at a moment’s warning. Our appearance in the deserted harbor had clearly already been registered and was causing something of a panic. As Cicero led us cautiously toward it, three short blasts sounded on a trumpet, and the ship’s hull sprouted oars, like some immense water beetle, and edged away from the quayside. It moved a short distance out to sea and dropped anchor. As the vessel turned into the wind, the lanterns at its prow and stern danced bright yellow in the gloomy afternoon, and figures deployed along its heaving decks. Cicero debated with Lucius and young Frugi what to do. In theory, his warrant from the extortion court gave him authority to board and search any vessel he suspected of connection with the case. In truth, we lacked the resources, and by the time reinforcements could be summoned, the ship would be long gone. What it showed beyond doubt was that Verres’s crimes were on a scale far more vast than anything Cicero had imagined. He decided we should press on south at redoubled speed.

I guess it must be 120 miles from Velia down to Vibo, running straight along the shinbone to the toe of Italy. But with a favorable wind and strong rowing we did it in just two days. We kept always within sight of the shore, and put in for one night on the sandy beach, where we cut down a thicket of myrtle to make a campfire and used our oars and sail for a tent. From Vibo we took the coast road to Regium, and here we chartered a second boat to sail across the narrow straits to Sicily. We set off on a misty early morning in a saturating drizzle. The distant island appeared on the horizon as a dreary black hump. Unfortunately there was only one place to make for, especially in midwinter, and that was Verres’s stronghold of Messana. Throughout all his three years as governor, he had bought the loyalty of its inhabitants by exempting them from taxes, and alone of the towns on the island, it had refused to offer Cicero any cooperation. We steered toward its lighthouse, and as we drew closer realized that what we had perceived as a large mast at the entrance to the harbor was not part of a ship at all, but a cross, facing directly across the straits to the mainland.

“That is new,” said Cicero, frowning as he wiped the rain from his eyes. “This was never a place of execution in our day.”

We had no option but to sail straight past it, and the sight fell across our waterlogged spirits like a shadow.

Despite the general hostility of the people of Messana toward the special prosecutor, two citizens-Basiliscus and Percennius-had bravely agreed to offer him hospitality, and were waiting on the quayside to greet us. The moment he stepped ashore, Cicero queried them about the cross, but they begged to be excused from answering until they had transported us away from the wharf. Only when we were in the compound of Basiliscus’s house did they feel it safe to tell the story. Verres had spent his last days as governor living full-time in Messana, supervising the loading of his loot aboard the treasure ship which the grateful town had built for him. There had been a festival in his honor about a month ago, and almost as part of the entertainment, a Roman citizen had been dragged from the prison, stripped naked in the Forum, publicly flogged, and finally crucified.

Cicero was incredulous. “A Roman citizen?” He gestured at me to begin making notes. “But it is illegal to execute a Roman citizen without a full trial. Are you sure that is what he was?”

“He cried out that his name was Publius Gavius, that he was a merchant from Spain, and and that he had done military service in the legions. Throughout his whipping he screamed, ‘I am a Roman citizen!’ every time he received a blow.”

“‘I am a Roman citizen,’” repeated Cicero, savoring the phrase. “‘I am a Roman citizen…’ But what was alleged to be his crime?”

“Spying,” replied our host. “He was on the point of boarding a ship for Italy. But he made the mistake of telling everyone he met that he had escaped from the Stone Quarries in Syracuse and was going straight to Rome to expose all Verres’s crimes. The elders of Messana had him arrested and held until Verres arrived. Then Verres ordered him to be scourged, tortured with hot irons, and executed on a cross looking out across the straits to Regium so that he could see the mainland throughout his final agonies. Imagine that-being only five miles from safety! The cross has been left standing by the followers of Verres as a warning to anyone else who feels tempted to talk too freely.”

“There were witnesses to this crucifixion?”

“Of course. Hundreds.”

“Including Roman citizens?”

“Yes.”

“Could you identify any of them?”

Basiliscus hesitated. “Gaius Numitorius, a Roman knight from Puteoli. The Cottius brothers from Tauromenium. Lucceius-he is from Regium. There must have been others.”

I took down their names. Afterwards, while Cicero was having a bath, we gathered beside his tub to discuss this development. Lucius said, “Perhaps this man Gavius really was a spy.”

“I would be more inclined to believe that,” replied Cicero, “if Verres had not brought exactly the same charge against Sthenius, who is no more a spy than you or I. No, this is the monster’s favored method of operation: he arranges a trumped-up charge, then uses his position as supreme justice in the province to reach a verdict and pronounce sentence. The question is: why did he pick on Gavius?”

Nobody had an answer; nor did we have the spare time to linger in Messana and try to find one. Early the following morning we had to leave for our first official engagement, in the northern coastal town of Tyndaris. This visit set the pattern for a score which followed. The council came out to greet Cicero with full honors. He was conducted into the municipal square. He was shown the standard-issue statue of Verres, which the citizens had been obliged to pay for and which they had now pulled down and smashed. Cicero made a short speech about Roman justice. His chair was set up. He listened to the complaints of the locals. He then selected those which were most eye-catching or most easily proved-in Tyndaris it was the story of Sopater, bound naked to a statue until the town yielded up its bronze of Mercury-and finally either I or one of my two assistants moved in to take statements, which would be witnessed and signed.

From Tyndaris we traveled on to Sthenius’s home city of Thermae, where we saw his wife in his empty house, who sobbed as we delivered letters from her exiled husband, and then ended the week in the fortress port of Lilybaeum, on the extreme western tip of the island. Cicero knew this place well, having been based here when he was a junior magistrate. We stayed, as so often in the past, at the home of his old friend Pamphilius. Over dinner on the first night, Cicero noticed that the usual decorations of the table-a beautiful jug and goblets, all family heirlooms-were missing, and when he asked what had become of them, was told that Verres had seized them. It quickly transpired that all the other guests in the dining room had similar tales to tell. Young Gaius Cacurius had been obliged to give up all his furniture, and Lutatius a citrus-wood table at which Cicero had regularly eaten. Lyso had been robbed of his precious statue of Apollo, and Diodorus of a set of chased silver cups by Mentor. The list was endless, and I should know, for I was summoned to compile it. After taking statements from each of them, and subsequently from all their friends, I began to think that Cicero had gone a little mad-did he plan to catalogue every stolen spoon and cream jug on the island?-but of course he was cleverer than I, as events would show.

We moved on a few days later, rattling down the unmade tracks from Lilybaeum to the temple city of Agrigentum, then up into the mountainous heart of the island. The winter was unusually harsh; the land and sky were iron. Cicero caught a bad cold and sat wrapped in his cloak in the back of our cart. At Henna, a town built precipitously into the cliffs and surrounded by lakes and woods, the ululating priests came out to greet us, wearing their elaborate robes and carrying their sacred boughs, and took us to the shrine of Ceres, from which Verres had removed the goddess’s statue. And here for the first time our escort became involved in scuffles with the lictors of the new governor, Lucius Metellus. These brutes with their rods and axes stood to one side of the market square and shouted threats of dire penalties for any witness who dared to testify against Verres. Nevertheless, Cicero persuaded three prominent citizens of Henna-Theodorus, Numenius, and Nicasio-to undertake to come to Rome and give their evidence.

Finally we turned southeast toward the sea again, into the fertile plains below Mount Aetna. This was state-owned land, administered on behalf of the Roman treasury by a revenue-collection company, which in turn awarded leases to local farmers. When Cicero had first been on the island, the plains of Leontini had been the granary of Rome. But now we drove past deserted farmhouses and gray, untended fields, punctuated by drifting columns of brown smoke, where the homeless former tenants now lived in the open. Verres and his friends in the tax company had fanned out across the region like a ravaging army, commandeering crops and livestock for a fraction of their true value, and raising rents far beyond what most could pay. One farmer who had dared to complain, Nymphodorus of Centuripae, had been seized by Verres’s tithe collector, Apronius, and hanged from an olive tree in the marketplace of Aetna. Such stories enraged Cicero and drove him to fresh exertions. I still cherish the memory of this most urbane of gentlemen, his toga hoisted around his knees, his fine red shoes in one hand, his warrant in the other, picking his way daintily across a muddy field in the pouring rain to take evidence from a farmer at his plow. By the time we came at last to Syracuse, after more than thirty days of arduous travels around the province, we had the statements of nearly two hundred witnesses.

Syracuse is by far the largest and fairest of Sicily’s cities. It is four towns, really, which have merged into one. Three of these-Achradina, Tycha, and Neapolis-have spread themselves around the harbor, and in the center of this great natural bay sits the fourth, known simply as the Island, the ancient royal seat, which is linked to the others by a bridge. This walled city-within-a-city, forbidden at night to Sicilians, is where the Roman governor has his palace, close by the great temples of Diana and Minerva. We had feared a hostile reception, given that Syracuse was said to be second only to Messana in its loyalty to Verres, and its senate had recently voted him a eulogy. In fact, the opposite was the case. News of Cicero’s honesty and diligence had preceded him, and we were escorted through the Agrigentine Gate by a crowd of cheering citizens. (One reason for Cicero’s popularity was that, as a young magistrate, he had located in the overgrown municipal cemetery the 130-year-old lost tomb of the mathematician Archimedes, the greatest man in the history of Syracuse. Typically, he had read somewhere that it was marked by a cylinder and a sphere, and once he had found the monument, he paid to have the weeds and brambles cleared away. He had then spent many hours beside it, pondering the transience of human glory. His generosity and respect had not been forgotten by the local population.)

But to resume: we were lodged in the home of a Roman knight, Lucius Flavius, an old friend of Cicero’s, who had plenty of stories of Verres’s corruption and cruelty to add to our already bulging stock. There was the tale of the pirate captain, Heracleo, who had been able to sail right into Syracuse at the head of a squadron of four small galleys, pillage the warehouses, and leave without encountering any resistance. Captured some weeks later, farther up the coast at Megara, neither he nor his men had been paraded as prisoners, and there were rumors that Verres had exchanged him for a large ransom. Then there was the horrible business of a Roman banker from Spain, Lucius Herennius, who had been dragged into the forum of Syracuse one morning, summarily denounced as a spy and, on Verres’s orders, beheaded-this despite the pleadings of his friends and business associates, who had rushed to the scene. The similarity of Herennius’s case to that of Gavius in Messana was striking: both Romans, both from Spain, both involved in commerce, both accused of spying, and both executed without a hearing or a proper trial.

That night, after dinner, Cicero received a messenger from Rome. He read the letter, then immediately excused himself and took Lucius, young Frugi, and me aside. The dispatch was from his brother Quintus, and it contained grave news. Hortensius was up to his old tricks again. The extortion court had unexpectedly given permission for a prosecution to be brought against the former governor of Achaia. The prosecutor, Dasianus, a known associate of Verres, had traveled to Greece and back to present his evidence two days before the deadline set for Cicero’s return. Quintus urged his brother to return to Rome as quickly as possible to retrieve the situation.

“It is a trap,” said Lucius, “to make you panic, and cut short your expedition here.”

“Probably so,” agreed Cicero. “But I cannot afford to take the risk. If this other prosecution slips into the court’s schedule before ours, and if Hortensius spins it out as he likes to do, our case could be pushed back until after the elections. By then Hortensius and Metellus will be consuls-elect. That youngest Metellus brother will no doubt be a praetor-elect, and this third will still be governor here. How will that be for having the odds stacked against us?”

“So what are we going to do?”

“We have wasted too much time pursuing the small fry in this investigation,” said Cicero. “We need to take the war into the enemy’s camp and loosen some tongues among those who really know what has been going on-the Romans themselves.”

“I agree,” said Lucius. “The question is: how?”

Cicero glanced around and lowered his voice before replying. “We shall carry out a raid,” he announced. “A raid on the offices of the revenue collectors.”

Even Lucius looked slightly green at that. Short of marching up to the governor’s palace and attempting to arrest Metellus, this was the most provocative gesture Cicero could make. The revenue collectors were a syndicate of well-connected men, of equestrian rank, operating under statutory protection, whose investors would certainly include some of the wealthiest senators in Rome. Cicero himself, as a specialist in commercial law, had built up a network of supporters among exactly this class of businessman. He knew it was a risky strategy, but he was not to be dissuaded, for it was here, he was sure, that the dark heart of Verres’s murderous corruption would be found. He sent the messenger back to Rome that same night with a letter for Quintus, announcing that he had only one more thing left to do, and that he would depart the island within a few days.

Cicero now had to make his preparations with great speed and secrecy. He deliberately timed his raid to take place two days hence, at the least-expected hour-just before dawn on a major public holiday, Terminalia. The fact that this was a day sacred to Terminus, the ancient god of boundaries and good neighbors, only made it more symbolically attractive. Flavius, our host, agreed to come with us, to point out the location of the offices. In the interim, I went down to the harbor in Syracuse and found the trusty skipper I had used years before, when Cicero made his ill-judged return to Italy; hired a ship and crew; and told him to be ready to sail before the end of the week. The evidence we had already collected was packed in trunks and stowed aboard, and the ship was placed under guard.

None of us got much sleep on the night of the raid. In the darkness before dawn we positioned our hired oxcarts at either end of the street to block it, and when Cicero gave the signal we all jumped out carrying our torches. The senator hammered on the door, stood aside without waiting for a reply, and a couple of our burliest attendants took their axes to it. The instant it yielded, we poured into the passage, knocking aside the elderly night watchman, and secured the company’s records. We quickly formed a human chain-Cicero, too-and passed the boxes of wax tablets and papyrus rolls from hand to hand, out into the street and onto our carts.

I learned one valuable lesson that day: if you seek popularity, there is no surer way of achieving it than by raiding a syndicate of tax collectors. As the sun rose and news of our activity spread, an enthusiastic honor guard of Syracusans formed themselves around us, more than large enough to deter the director of the company, Carpinatius, when he arrived to reoccupy the building with a detachment of legionnaires lent to him for the purpose by Lucius Metellus. He and Cicero fell into a furious argument in the middle of the road, Carpinatius insisting that provincial tax records were protected by law from seizure, Cicero retorting that his warrant from the extortion court overrode such technicalities. Cicero conceded afterwards that Carpinatius was right, “but,” he added, “he who controls the street controls the law”-and on this occasion, at least, that man was Cicero.

In all, we must have transported more than four cartloads of records back to the house of Flavius. We locked the gates, posted sentries, and then began the wearying business of sorting through them. Even now, remembering the size of the task that confronted us, I find myself starting to break into a sweat of apprehension. These records, which went back years, not only covered all the state land on Sicily, but also itemized every farmer’s number and quality of grazing animals, and every crop he had ever sown, its size and yield. Here were details of loans issued and taxes paid and correspondence entered into. And it quickly became clear that other hands had already been through this mass of material and removed every trace of Verres’s name. A furious message arrived from the governor’s palace, demanding that Cicero appear before Metellus when the courts reopened the following day, to answer a writ from Carpinatius that he return the documents. Meanwhile, a crowd had gathered outside and was chanting Cicero’s name. At that moment Terentia’s prediction that she and her husband would be ostracized by Rome and end their days as consul and first lady of Thermae seemed more prescient. Only Cicero retained his cool. He had represented enough shady revenue collectors to know most of their tricks. Once it became apparent that the files specifically relating to Verres had been excised, he dug out an old list of all the company’s managers and hunted through it until he came to the name of the firm’s financial director during the period of Verres’s governorship.

“I shall tell you one thing, Tiro,” he said. “I have never come across a financial director yet who did not keep an extra set of records for himself when he handed over to his successor, just to be on the safe side.”

And with that we set off on our second raid of the morning.

Our quarry was a man named Vibius, who was at that moment celebrating Terminalia with his neighbors. They had set up an altar in the garden and there was some corn upon it, also some honeycombs and wine, and Vibius had just sacrificed a suckling pig. (“Very pious, these crooked accountants,” observed Cicero.) When he saw the senator bearing down upon him, he looked a little like a suckling pig himself, but once he had read the warrant, with Glabrio’s praetorian seal attached to it, he reluctantly decided there was nothing he could do except cooperate. Excusing himself from his bemused guests, he led us inside to his tablinum and opened up his strongbox. Among the title deeds, account books, and jewelry, there was a little packet of letters marked “Verres,” and his face, as Cicero broke it open, was one of utter terror. I guess he must have been told to destroy it and had either forgotten or had thought to make some profit out of it.

At first sight, it was nothing much-merely some correspondence from a tax inspector, Lucius Canuleius, who was responsible for collecting export duty on all goods passing through Syracuse harbor. The letters concerned one particular shipment of goods which had left Syracuse two years before, and upon which Verres had failed to pay any tax. The details were attached: four hundred casks of honey, fifty dining room couches, two hundred chandeliers, and ninety bales of Maltese cloth. Another prosecutor might not have spotted the significance, but Cicero saw it at once.

“Take a look at that,” he said, handing it to me. “These are not goods seized from a number of unfortunate individuals. Four hundred casks of honey? Ninety bales of foreign cloth?” He turned his furious gaze on the hapless Vibius. “This is a cargo, isn’t it? Your Governor Verres must have stolen a ship.”

Poor Vibius never stood a chance. Glancing nervously over his shoulder at his bewildered guests, who were staring open-mouthed in our direction, he confirmed that this was indeed a ship’s cargo, and that Canuleius had been instructed never again to attempt to levy tax on any of the governor’s exports.

“How many more such shipments did Verres make?” demanded Cicero.

“I am not sure.”

“Guess then.”

“Ten,” said Vibius fearfully. “Perhaps twenty.”

“And no duty was ever paid? No records kept?”

“No.”

“And where did Verres acquire all these cargoes?” demanded Cicero.

Vibius was almost swooning with terror. “Senator. Please-”

“I shall have you arrested,” said Cicero. “I shall have you transported to Rome in chains. I shall break you on the witness stand before a thousand spectators in the Forum Romanum and feed what’s left of you to the dogs of the Capitoline Triad.”

“From ships, senator,” said Vibius, in a little mouse voice. “They came from ships.”

“What ships? Ships from where?”

“From everywhere, senator. Asia. Syria. Tyre. Alexandria.”

“So what happened to these ships? Did Verres have them impounded?”

“Yes, senator.”

“On what grounds?”

“Spying.”

“Ah, spying! Of course! Did ever a man,” said Cicero to me, “root out so many spies as our vigilant Governor Verres? So tell us,” he said, turning back to Vibius, “what became of the crews of these spy ships?”

“They were taken to the Stone Quarries, senator.”

“And what happened to them then?”

He made no reply.

THE STONE QUARRIES was the most fearsome prison in Sicily, probably the most fearsome in the world-at any rate, I never heard of worse. It was six hundred feet long and two hundred wide, gouged deep into the solid rock of that fortified plateau known as Epipolae, which overlooks Syracuse from the north. Here, in this hellish pit, from which no scream could carry, exposed without protection to the burning heat of summer and the cold downpours of winter, tormented by the cruelty of their guards and the debased appetites of their fellow prisoners alike, the victims of Verres suffered and died.

Cicero, with his notorious aversion to military life, was often charged with cowardice by his enemies, and certainly he was prone to nerves and squeamishness. But I can vouch that he was brave enough that day. He went back to our headquarters and collected Lucius, leaving young Frugi behind to continue his search of the tax records. Then, armed only with our walking sticks and the warrant issued by Glabrio, and followed by the now usual crowd of Syracusans, we climbed the steep path to Epipolae, where the news of Cicero’s approach and the nature of his mission had preceded him. After the senator issued a withering harangue to the captain of the guard, threatening all manner of dire repercussions if his demands were not met, we were allowed to pass through the perimeter wall and onto the plateau. Once inside, refusing to heed warnings that it was too dangerous, Cicero insisted on being allowed to inspect the quarries himself.

This vast dungeon, the work of Dionysius the Tyrant, was already more than three centuries old. An ancient metal door was unlocked and we proceeded into the mouth of a tunnel, guided by prison guards who carried burning torches. The glistening walls cankerous with lime and fungi, the scuttling of the rats in the shadows, the stench of death and waste, the cries and groans of abandoned souls-truly, this was a descent into Hades. Eventually we came to another massive door, and when this was unlocked and unbolted we stepped onto the floor of the prison. What a spectacle greeted our eyes! It was as if some giant had filled a sack with hundreds of manacled men and had then tipped them out into a hole. The light was weak, almost subaquatic, and everywhere, as far as the eye could see, there were prisoners. Some shuffled about, a few huddled in groups, but most lay apart from their fellows, mere yellowing sacks of bones. The day’s dead had not yet been cleared, and it was hard to distinguish the living skeletons from the dead.

We picked our way among the corpses-those that had already died, and those whose end had yet to come: there was no discernible difference-and occasionally Cicero stopped and asked a man his name, bending to catch the whispered reply. We found no Romans, only Sicilians. “Is any man here a Roman citizen?” he demanded loudly. “Have any of you been taken from ships?” There was silence. He turned and called for the captain of the watch and demanded to see the prison records. Like Vibius, the wretch struggled between fear of Verres and fear of the special prosecutor, but eventually he succumbed to Cicero’s pressure.

Built into the rock walls of the quarry were separate special cells and galleries, where torture and execution were carried out, and where the guards ate and slept. (The favored method of execution, we discovered afterwards, was the garrote.) Here, too, was housed the administration of the prison, such as it was. Boxes of damp and musty rolls were fetched out for us, containing long lists of prisoners’ names, with the dates of their arrivals and departures. Some men were recorded as having been released, but against most was scratched the Sicilian word edikaiothesan-meaning “the death penalty was inflicted upon them.”

“I want a copy of every entry for the three years when Verres was governor,” Cicero said to me. “And you,” he said to the prison captain, “when it is done, will sign a statement to say that we have made a true likeness.”

While I and the other two secretaries set to work, Cicero and Lucius searched through the records for Roman names. Although the majority of those held in the quarry during Verres’s time were obviously Sicilian, there was also a considerable proportion of races from all across the Mediterranean-Spaniards, Egyptians, Syrians, Cilicians, Cretans, Dalmatians. When Cicero asked why they had been imprisoned, he was told they were pirates-pirates and spies. All were recorded as having been put to death, among them the infamous pirate captain Heracleo. The Romans, on the other hand, were officially described as “released”-including the two men from Spain, Publius Gavius and Lucius Herennius, whose executions had been described to us.

“These records are nonsense,” said Cicero quietly to Lucius, “the very opposite of the truth. No one saw Heracleo die, although the spectacle of a pirate on the cross invariably draws an enthusiastic crowd. But plenty saw the Romans executed. It looks to me as though Verres simply switched the two about-killed the innocent ships’ crews and freed the pirates, no doubt on payment of a fat ransom. If Gavius and Herennius had discovered his treachery, that would explain why Verres had been so eager to kill them quickly.”

I thought poor Lucius was going to be sick. He had come a long way from his philosophy books in sunlit Rome to find himself studying death lists by the guttering light of candles, eighty feet beneath the dripping earth. We finished as quickly as we could, and never have I been more glad to escape from anywhere than I was to climb the tunnel out of the quarries. A slight breeze had sprung up, blowing in across the sea, and even more than a half century later I remember how we all instinctively turned our faces to it and gratefully drank in that cold, clear air.

“Promise me,” said Lucius after a while, “that if ever you achieve this imperium you desire so much, you will never preside over cruelty and injustice such as this.”

“I swear it,” replied Cicero. “And if ever, my dear Lucius, you should question why good men forsake philosophy to seek power in the real world, promise me in return that you will always remember what you witnessed in the Stone Quarries of Syracuse.”

BY THIS TIME it was late afternoon, and Syracuse, thanks to Cicero’s activities, was in a tumult. The crowd which had followed us up the steep slope to the prison had grown larger, and had been joined by some of the most distinguished citizens of the city, among them the chief priest of Jupiter, all dressed up in his sacred robes. This pontificate, traditionally reserved for the highest-ranking Syracusan, was held presently by none other than Cicero’s client, Heraclius, who had returned privately from Rome to help us, at considerable personal risk. He came with a request that Cicero should immediately accompany him to the city’s senate chamber, where the elders were waiting to give him a formal civic welcome. Cicero was of two minds. He had much work to do, and it was undoubtedly a breach of protocol for a Roman senator to address a local assembly without the permission of the governor. However, it also promised to be a wonderful opportunity to further his inquiries. After a short hesitation, he agreed to go, and we duly set off on foot back down the hill with a huge escort of respectful Sicilians.

The Senate chamber was packed. Beneath a gilded statue of Verres himself, the house’s most senior senator, the venerable Diodorus, welcomed Cicero in Greek and apologized for the fact that they had so far offered him no assistance: not until the events of today had they truly believed he was in earnest. Cicero, also speaking in Greek, and fired up by the scenes he had just witnessed, made a brilliant off-the-cuff speech in which he promised to dedicate his life to righting the injustices done to the people of Sicily. At the end of it, the Syracusan senators voted almost unanimously to rescind their eulogy to Verres (which they swore they had been pressured into by Metellus) and amid loud cheers, several younger members threw ropes around the neck of Verres’s statue and pulled it down. More important, others fetched out of the senate’s secret archives a wealth of new evidence which they had been collecting about Verres’s crimes. These outrages included the theft of twenty-seven priceless portraits from the Temple of Minerva-even the highly decorated doors of the sanctuary had been carried away!-as well as details of all the bribes Verres had demanded to bring in “not guilty” verdicts when he was a judge.

News of this assembly and the toppling of the statue had by now reached the governor’s palace, and when we tried to leave the Senate House we found the building ringed with Roman soldiers. The meeting was dissolved on Metellus’s orders, Heraclius arrested, and Cicero ordered to report to the governor at once. There could easily have been a bloody riot, but Cicero leapt up onto the back of a cart and told the Sicilians to calm themselves, that Metellus would not dare to harm a Roman senator acting on the authority of a praetor’s court-although he did add, and only half in jest, that if he had not emerged by nightfall, they might perhaps make inquiries as to his whereabouts. He then clambered down and we allowed ourselves to be conducted over the bridge and onto the Island.

The Metellus family were at this time approaching the zenith of their power. In particular, the branch of the clan that had produced the three brothers, Quintus, Lucius, and Marcus-all then in their forties-looked set to dominate Rome for years to come. It was, as Cicero said, a three-headed monster, and this middle head-the second brother, Lucius-was in many ways the most formidable of all. He received us in the royal chamber of the governor’s palace with the full panoply of his imperium-an imposing, handsome figure, seated in his curule chair beneath the unyielding marble gaze of a dozen of his predecessors, flanked by his lictors, with his junior magistrate and his clerks behind him, and an armed sentry on the door.

“It is a treasonable offense,” he began, without rising and without preliminaries, “to foment rebellion in a Roman province.”

“It is also a treasonable offense,” retorted Cicero, “to insult the people and Senate of Rome by impeding their appointed representative in his duties.”

“Really? And what kind of ‘Roman representative’ addresses a Greek Senate in its native tongue? Everywhere you have gone in this province, you have stirred up trouble. I will not have it! We have too small a garrison to keep order among so many natives. You are making this place ungovernable, with your damned agitation.”

“I assure you, governor, the resentment is against Verres, not against Rome.”

“Verres!” Metellus banged the arm of his chair. “Since when did you care about Verres? I shall tell you when. Since you saw a chance to use him as a way of advancing yourself, you shitty little seditious lawyer.”

“Take this down, Tiro,” Cicero said without turning his gaze from Metellus. “I want a verbatim record. Such intimidation is entirely admissible in court.”

But I was too frightened even to move, for there was a lot of shouting now from the other men in the room, and Metellus had jumped to his feet. “I order you,” he said, “to return the documents you stole this morning!”

“And I remind the governor,” replied Cicero calmly, “with the greatest respect, that he is not on the parade ground, that he is addressing a free Roman citizen, and I shall discharge the duty I have been assigned!”

Metellus had his hands on his hips and was leaning forward, his broad chin thrust out. “You will undertake to return those documents now, in private-or you will be ordered to return them tomorrow in court, before the whole of Syracuse!”

“I choose to take my chance in court, as always,” said Cicero, with a tiny inclination of his head. “Especially knowing what an impartial and honorable judge I shall have in you, Lucius Metellus-the worthy heir of Verres!”

I know I have this conversation exactly right, because the moment we were outside the chamber-which was very soon after this last exchange-Cicero and I reconstructed it while it was still fresh in our memories, in case he did indeed have occasion to use it in court. (The fair copy remains to this day among his papers.)

“That went well,” he joked, but his hand and voice were trembling, for it was now plain that his whole mission, perhaps even his mortal safety, were in the gravest peril. “But if you seek power,” he said, almost to himself, “and if you are a new man, this is what you have to do. Nobody is ever going to simply hand it to you.”

We returned at once to the house of Flavius and worked by the weak light of smoky Sicilian candles and stuttering oil lamps all night, to prepare for court the following morning. Frankly, I did not see what Cicero could possibly hope to achieve, except humiliation. Metellus was never going to award judgment in his favor, and besides-as Cicero had privately conceded-the right of law lay with the tax company. But fortune, as the noble Terence has it, favors the brave, and she certainly favored Cicero that night. It was young Frugi who made the breakthrough. I have not mentioned Frugi as often in this narrative as I should have done, chiefly because he had that kind of quiet decency which does not attract much comment, and which is only noticed when its possessor has gone. He had spent the day on the tax-company records, and in the evening, despite having caught Cicero’s cold, he refused to go to bed and switched his attention instead to the evidence collected by the Syracusan senate. It must have been long after midnight when I suddenly heard him utter a cry and beckon us all over to the table. Laid out across it was a series of wax tablets, detailing the company’s banking activities. Taken on their own, the list of names, dates, and sums loaned meant little. But once Frugi compared it with the list compiled by the Syracusans of those who had been forced to pay a bribe to Verres, we could see they tallied exactly: his victims had raised the funds they needed to buy him off by borrowing. Better still was the effect produced when he laid out a third set of accounts: the company’s receipts. On the same dates, exactly the same sums had been redeposited with the tax company by a character named “Gaius Verrucius.” The depositor’s identity was so crudely forged, we all burst out laughing, for obviously the name originally entered had been “Verres,” but in every case the last two letters had been scraped off and “ucius” added as a replacement.

“So Verres demanded a bribe,” said Cicero, with growing excitement, “and insisted his victim borrow the necessary cash from Carpinatius-no doubt at an extortionate rate of interest. Then he reinvested the bribe with his friends in the tax company, so that he not only protected his capital but earned an extra share of the profits as well! Brilliant villain! Brilliant, greedy, stupid villain!” And after executing a brief dance of delight he flung his arms around the embarrassed Frugi and kissed him warmly on both cheeks.

Of all Cicero’s courtroom triumphs, I should say that the one he enjoyed the following day was among the sweetest-especially considering that technically it was not a victory at all but a defeat. He selected the evidence he needed to take back to Rome, and Lucius, Frugi, Sositheus, Laurea, and I each carried a box of documents down to the Syracusan forum, where Metellus had set up his tribunal. An immense throng of people had already gathered. Carpinatius was sitting waiting for us. He fancied himself as quite a lawyer and presented his own case, quoting all the relevant statutes and precedents establishing that tax records could not be removed from a province, and generally gave the impression that he was merely the humble victim of an overmighty senator. Cicero hung his head and put on such a mime of dejection I found it hard to keep a straight face. When at last he got to his feet he apologized for his actions, conceded he was wrong in law, begged forgiveness from the governor, promised gladly to return the documents to Carpinatius, but-he paused-but there was one small point he did not understand, which he would be very grateful to have cleared up first. He picked up one of the wax tablets and studied it in bafflement. “Who exactly is Gaius Verrucius?”

Carpinatius, who had been smiling happily, looked like a man struck in the chest by an arrow fired from very short range, while Cicero, in a puzzled manner, as if it were all a mystery far beyond his comprehension, pointed out the coincidence of names, dates, and sums in the tax company’s records and the claims of bribery compiled by the Syracusan senate.

“And there is another thing,” said Cicero pleasantly. “This gentleman, who did so much business with you, does not appear in your accounts before his near-namesake, Gaius Verres, came to Sicily, and he has not done any business with you since Gaius Verres left. But in those three years when Verres was here, he was your biggest client.” He showed the accounts to the crowd. “And it is unfortunate-do you see?-that whenever the slave who wrote up your records came to put down his name he always made the same slip of his stylus. But there we are. I am sure there is nothing suspicious about it. So perhaps you could simply tell the court who this Verrucius is, and where he can be found.”

Carpinatius looked helplessly toward Metellus as someone in the crowd shouted, “He does not exist!” “There never was anyone in Sicily called Verrucius!” yelled another. “It is Verres!” And the crowd started chanting: “It is Verres! It is Verres!”

Cicero held up his hand for silence. “Carpinatius insists I cannot remove these records from the province, and I concede in law he is correct. But nowhere in law does it say I cannot make a copy, as long as it is fair and properly witnessed. All I need is help. Who here will help me copy these records so that I can take them back to Rome and bring this swine Verres to justice for his crimes against the people of Sicily?”

A plantation of hands sprang up. Metellus tried to call for silence, but his words were lost in the din of people shouting their support. Cicero, with Flavius to help him, picked out all the most eminent men in the city-Sicilian and Roman alike-and invited them to come forward and take a share of the evidence, whereupon I handed each volunteer a tablet and stylus. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Carpinatius frantically struggling across to Metellus, who, with his arms folded, scowled down from his raised bench at the chaos in his court. Eventually he turned and strode angrily up the steps and into the temple behind him.

Thus ended Cicero’s visit to Sicily. Metellus, I am sure, would dearly have liked to have arrested Cicero, or at least prevented him from removing evidence. But Cicero had won over too many adherents in both the Roman and the Sicilian communities. To have seized him would have caused an insurrection, and as Metellus had conceded, he did not have the troops to control the entire population. By the end of that afternoon, the copies of the tax company’s records had been witnessed, sealed, and transferred to our guarded ship in the harbor, where they joined the other trunks of evidence. Cicero himself remained only one more night on the island, drawing up the list of witnesses he wished to bring to Rome. Lucius and Frugi agreed to remain behind in Syracuse to arrange their transportation.

The following morning they came down to the dock to see Cicero off. The harbor was packed with well-wishers, and he made a gracious speech of thanks. “I know that I carry in this fragile vessel the hopes of this entire province. Insofar as it lies within my power, I shall not let you down.” Then I helped him onto the deck, where he stood with fresh tears shining on his cheeks. Consummate actor that he was, I knew that he could summon any emotion at will, but I am sure that on that day his feelings were unfeigned. I wonder, indeed, looking back on it, if he somehow knew that he would never return to the island again. As the oarsmen pulled us through the channel the faces on the quayside blurred, the figures dwindled and disappeared. Slowly we headed through the mouth of the harbor and into open water.