Imperium

Roll IX

AND SO IT CAME ABOUT that on the fifth day of August, in the consulship of Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus and Marcus Licinius Crassus, one year and nine months after Sthenius had first come to see Cicero, the trial of Gaius Verres began.

Bear in mind the summer heat. Calculate the number of victims with an interest in seeing Verres brought to justice. Remember that Rome was, in any case, swarming with citizens in town for the census, the elections, and the impending games of Pompey. Consider that the hearing pitched the two greatest orators of the day in head-to-head combat (“a duel of real magnitude,” as Cicero later called it). Put all this together, and you may begin to guess something of the atmosphere in the extortion court that morning. Hundreds of spectators, determined to have a decent vantage point, had slept out in the Forum overnight. By dawn, there was nowhere left to stand that offered any shade. By the second hour, there was nowhere left at all. In the porticoes and on the steps of the Temple of Castor, in the Forum itself and in the colonnades surrounding it, on the rooftops and balconies of the houses, on the sides of the hills-anywhere that human beings could squeeze themselves into or hang off or perch on-there you would find the people of Rome.

Frugi and I scurried around like a pair of sheepdogs, herding our witnesses into court, and what an exotic and colorful assembly they made, in their sacred robes and native dress, victims from every stage of Verres’s career, drawn by the promise of vengeance-priests of Juno and Ceres, the mystagogues of the Syracusan Minerva and the sacred virgins of Diana; Greek nobles whose descent was traced to Cecrops or Eurysthenes or to the great Ionian and Minyan houses, and Phoenicians whose ancestors had been priests of Tyrian Melcarth or claimed kindred with the Zidonian Iah; eager crowds of impoverished heirs and their guardians, bankrupt farmers and corn merchants and ship owners, fathers bewailing their children carried off to slavery, children mourning for their parents dead in the governor’s dungeons; deputations from the foot of Mount Taurus, from the shores of the Black Sea, from many cities of the Grecian mainland, from the islands of the Aegean, and of course from every city and market town of Sicily.

I was so busy helping to ensure that all the witnesses were admitted, and that every box of evidence was in its place and securely guarded, that only gradually did I come to realize what a spectacle Cicero had stage-managed. Those evidence boxes, for example, now included public testimony collected by the elders of virtually every town in Sicily. It was only when the jurors started shouldering their way through the masses and taking their places on the benches that I realized-showman that he was-why Cicero had been so insistent on having everything in place at once. The impression on the court was overwhelming. Even the hard faces, like old Catulus and Isauricus, registered astonishment. As for Glabrio, when he came out of the temple preceded by his lictors, he paused for a moment on the top step, and swayed half a pace backward when confronted by that wall of faces.

Cicero, who had been standing apart until the last possible moment, squeezed through the crowd and climbed the steps to his place on the prosecutor’s bench. There was a sudden quietness, a silent quiver of anticipation in the still air. Ignoring the shouts of encouragement from his supporters, he turned and shielded his eyes against the sun and scanned the vast audience, squinting to right and left, as I imagine a general might check the lie of the land and position of the clouds before a battle. Then he sat down, while I stationed myself at his back so that I could pass him any document he needed. The clerks of the court set up Glabrio’s curule chair-the signal that the tribunal was in session-and everything was ready, save for the presence of Verres and Hortensius. Cicero, who was as cool as I had ever seen him, whispered to me, “After all that, perhaps he is not coming.” Needless to say, he was coming-Glabrio sent one of his lictors to fetch him-but Hortensius was giving us a foretaste of his tactics, which would be to waste as much time as possible. Eventually, perhaps an hour late, to ironic applause, the immaculate figure of the consul-elect eased through the press of spectators, followed by his junior counsel-none other than young Scipio Nasica, the love rival of Cato-then Quintus Metellus, and finally came Verres himself, looking redder than usual in the heat. For a man with any shred of conscience, it would surely have been a vision out of hell to see those ranks of his victims and accusers, all ranged against him. But this monster merely bowed at them, as if he were delighted to greet old acquaintances.

Glabrio called the court to order, but before Cicero could rise to begin his speech, Hortensius jumped up to make a point of order: under the Cornelian Law, he declared, a prosecutor was entitled to call no more than forty-eight witnesses, but this prosecutor had brought to court at least double that number, purely for the purpose of intimidation! He then embarked on a long, learned, and elegant speech about the origins of the extortion court, which lasted for what felt like an hour. At length Glabrio cut him off, saying there was nothing in the law about restricting the number of witnesses present in court, only the number giving verbal evidence. Once again, he invited Cicero to open his case, and once again, Hortensius intervened with another point of order. The crowd began to jeer, but he pressed on, as he did repeatedly whenever Cicero rose to speak, and thus the first few hours of the day were lost in vexatious legal point-scoring.

It was not until the middle of the afternoon, as Cicero wearily rose to his feet for the ninth or tenth time, that Hortensius at last remained seated. Cicero looked at him, waited, then slowly spread his arms wide in mock amazement. A wave of laughter went around the Forum. Hortensius responded by gesturing with a foppish twirl of his hand to the well of the court, as if to say, “Be my guest.” Cicero bowed courteously and came forward. He cleared his throat.

There could scarcely have been a worse moment at which to begin such an immense undertaking. The heat was unbearable. The crowd was bored and restless. Hortensius was smirking. There were only perhaps two hours left before the court adjourned for the evening. And yet this was to be one of the most decisive moments in the history of our Roman law-indeed, in the history of all law, everywhere, I should not wonder.

“Gentlemen of the court,” said Cicero, and I bent my head over my tablet and noted the words in shorthand. I waited for him to continue. For almost the first time before a major speech, I had no idea what he was going to say. I waited a little longer, my heart thumping, and then nervously glanced up to find him walking across the court away from me. I thought he was going to stop and confront Verres, but instead he walked straight past him and halted in front of the senators in the jury.

“Gentlemen of the court,” he repeated, addressing them directly, “at this great political crisis, there has been offered to you, not through man’s wisdom but almost as the direct gift of heaven, the very thing you most need-a thing that will help more than anything else to mitigate the unpopularity of your Order and the suspicion surrounding these courts. A belief has become established-as harmful to the republic as it is to yourselves-that these courts, with you senators as the jury, will never convict any man, however guilty, if he has sufficient money.”

He put a wonderful, contemptuous stress on the last word. “You are not wrong there!” shouted a voice in the crowd.

“But the character of the man I am prosecuting,” continued Cicero, “is such that you may use him to restore your own good name. Gaius Verres has robbed the Treasury and behaved like a pirate and a destroying pestilence in his province of Sicily. You have only to find this man guilty, and respect in you will be rightly restored. But if you do not-if his immense wealth is sufficient to shatter your honesty-well then, I shall achieve one thing at least. The nation will not believe Verres to be right and me wrong-but they will certainly know all they need to know about a jury of Roman senators!”

It was a nice stroke to start off with. There was a rustle of approval from the great crowd that was like a wind moving through a forest, and in some curious sense the focus of the trial seemed at once to shift twenty paces to the left. It was as if the senators, sweating in the hot sun and squirming uncomfortably on their wooden benches, had become the accused, while the vast press of witnesses, drawn from every corner of the Mediterranean, was the jury. Cicero had never addressed such an immense throng before, but Molon’s training on the seashore stood him in good stead, and when he turned to the Forum his voice rang clear and true.

“Let me tell you of the impudent and insane plan that is now in Verres’s mind. It is plain to him that I am approaching this case so well prepared that I shall be able to pin him down as a robber and a criminal, not merely in the hearing of this court but in the eyes of the whole world. But in spite of this, he holds so low an opinion of the aristocracy, he believes the senatorial courts to be so utterly abandoned and corrupt, that he goes about boasting openly that he has bought the safest date for his trial, that he has bought the jury, and just to be on the safe side he has also bought the consular election for his two titled friends who have tried to intimidate my witnesses!”

This was what the crowd had come to hear. The rustle of approval became a roar. Metellus jumped up in anger, and so did Hortensius-yes, even Hortensius, who normally greeted any taunt in the arena with nothing more vulgar than a raised eyebrow. They began gesticulating angrily at Cicero.

“What?” he responded, turning on them. “Did you count on my saying nothing of so serious a matter? On my caring for anything, except my duty and my honor, when the country and my own reputation are in such danger? Metellus, I am amazed at you. To attempt to intimidate witnesses, especially these timorous and calamity-stricken Sicilians, by appealing to their awe of you as consul-elect, and to the power of your two brothers-if this is not judicial corruption, I should be glad to know what is! What would you not do for an innocent kinsman if you abandon duty and honor for an utter rascal who is no kin of yours at all? Because, I tell you this: Verres has been going around saying that you were only made consul because of his exertions, and that by January he will have the two consuls and the president of the court to suit him!”

I had to stop writing at this point, because the noise was too great for me to hear. Metellus and Hortensius both had their hands cupped to their mouths and were bellowing at Cicero. Verres was gesturing angrily at Glabrio to put a stop to this. The jury of senators sat immobile-most of them, I am sure, wishing they were anywhere but where they were-while individual spectators were having to be restrained by the lictors from storming the court. Eventually Glabrio managed to restore order, and Cicero resumed, in a much calmer voice.

“So these are their tactics. Today the court did not start its business until the middle of the afternoon-they are already reckoning that today does not count at all. It is only ten days to the games of Pompey the Great. These will occupy fifteen days and will be followed immediately by the Roman Games. So it will not be until after an interval of nearly forty days that they expect to begin their reply. They count on being able then, with the help of long speeches and technical evasions, to prolong the trial until the Games of Victory begin. These games are followed without a break by the Plebeian Games, after which there will be very few days, or none at all, on which the court can sit. In this way they reckon that all the impetus of the prosecution will be spent and exhausted, and that the whole case will come up afresh before Marcus Metellus, who is sitting there on this jury.

“So what am I to do? If I spend upon my speech the full time allotted me by law, there is the gravest danger that the man I am prosecuting will slip through my fingers. ‘Make your speech shorter’ is the obvious answer I was given a few days ago, and that is good advice. But, having thought the matter over, I shall go one better. Gentlemen, I shall make no speech at all.”

I glanced up in astonishment. Cicero was looking at Hortensius, and his rival was staring back at him with the most wonderful frozen expression on his face. He looked like a man who has been walking through a wood cheerfully enough, thinking himself safely alone, and has suddenly heard a twig snap behind him and has stopped dead in alarm.

“That is right, Hortensius,” said Cicero. “I am not going to play your game and spend the next ten days in the usual long address. I am not going to let the case drag on till January, when you and Metellus as consuls can use your lictors to drag my witnesses before you and frighten them into silence. I am not going to allow you gentlemen of the jury the luxury of forty days to forget my charges so that you can then lose yourselves and your consciences in the tangled thickets of Hortensius’s rhetoric. I am not going to delay the settlement of this case until all these multitudes who have come to Rome for the census and the games have dispersed to their homes in Italy. I am going to call my witnesses at once, beginning now, and this will be my procedure: I shall read out the individual charge. I shall comment and elaborate upon it. I shall bring forth the witness who supports it, and question him, and then you, Hortensius, will have the same opportunity as I for comment and cross-examination. I shall do all this and I shall rest my case within the space of ten days.”

All my long life I have treasured-and for what little remains of it I shall continue to treasure-the reactions of Hortensius, Verres, Metellus, and Scipio Nasica at that moment. Of course Hortensius was on his feet as soon as he had recovered his breath and was denouncing this break with precedent as entirely illegal. But Glabrio was ready for him, and told him brusquely that it was up to Cicero to present his case in whatever manner he wished, and that he, for one, was sick of interminable speeches, as he had made clear in this very court before the consular elections. His remarks had obviously been prepared beforehand, and Hortensius rose again to accuse him of collusion with the prosecution. Glabrio, who was an irritable man at the best of times, told him bluntly he had better guard his tongue, or he would have his lictors remove him from the court-consul-elect or no. Hortensius sat down furiously, folded his arms, and scowled at his feet as Cicero concluded his opening address, once again by turning to the jury.

“Today the eyes of the world are upon us, waiting to see how far the conduct of each man among us will be marked by obedience to his conscience and observance of the law. Even as you will pass your verdict upon the prisoner, so the people of Rome will pass their verdict upon yourselves. The case of Verres will determine whether, in a court composed of senators, the condemnation of a very guilty and very rich man can possibly occur. Because all the world knows that Verres is distinguished by nothing except his monstrous offenses and his immense wealth. Therefore if he is acquitted it will be impossible to imagine any explanation except the most shameful. So I advise you, gentlemen, for your own sakes, to see that this does not occur.” And with that he turned his back on them. “I call my first witness-Sthenius of Thermae.”

I doubt very strongly whether any of the aristocrats on that jury-Catulus, Isauricus, Metellus, Catilina, Lucretius, Aemilius, and the rest-had ever been addressed with such insolence before, especially by a new man without a single ancestral mask to show on his atrium wall. How they must have loathed being made to sit there and take it, especially given the deliriums of ecstasy with which Cicero was received by the vast crowd in the Forum when he sat down. As for Hortensius, it was possible almost to feel sorry for him. His entire career had been founded on his ability to memorize immense orations and deliver them with the aplomb of an actor. Now he was effectively struck mute; worse, he was faced with the prospect of having to deliver four dozen mini-speeches in reply to each of Cicero’s witnesses over the next ten days. He had not done sufficient research even remotely to attempt this, as became cruelly evident when Sthenius took the witness stand. Cicero had called him first as a mark of respect for the originator of this whole fantastic undertaking, and the Sicilian did not let him down. He had waited a long time for his day in court, and he gave a heart-wringing account of the way Verres had abused his hospitality, stolen his property, trumped up charges against him, fined him, tried to have him flogged, sentenced him to death in his absence, and then forged the records of the Syracusan court-records which Cicero produced in evidence and passed around the jury.

But when Glabrio called upon Hortensius to cross-examine the witness, the Dancing Master, not unnaturally, showed some reluctance to take the floor. The one golden rule of cross-examination is never, under any circumstances, to ask a question to which you do not know the answer, and Hortensius simply had no idea what Sthenius might say next. He shuffled a few documents, held a whispered consultation with Verres, then approached the witness stand. What could he do? After a few petulant questions, the implication of which was that the Sicilian was fundamentally hostile to Roman rule, he asked him why, of all the lawyers available, he had chosen to go straight to Cicero-a man known to be an agitator of the lower classes. Surely his whole motivation from the start was merely to stir up trouble?

“But I did not go straight to Cicero,” replied Sthenius in his ingenuous way. “The first advocate I went to was you.”

Even some of the jury laughed at that.

Hortensius swallowed and attempted to join in the merriment. “Did you really? I cannot say that I remember you.”

“Well, you wouldn’t, would you? You are a busy man. But I remember you, senator. You said you were representing Verres. You said you did not care how much of my property he had stolen-no court would ever believe the word of a Sicilian over a Roman.”

Hortensius had to wait for the storm of catcalls to die down. “I have no further questions for this witness,” he said in a grim voice, and with that the court was adjourned until the following day.

IT HAD BEEN MY INTENTION to describe in detail the trial of Gaius Verres, but now I come to set it down, I see there is no point. After Cicero’s tactical masterstroke on that first day, Verres and his advocates resembled nothing so much as the victims of a siege: holed up in their little fortress, surrounded by their enemies, battered day after day by a rain of missiles, and their crumbling walls undermined by tunnels. They had no means of fighting back. Their only hope was somehow to withstand the onslaught for the nine days remaining, and then try to regroup during the lull enforced by Pompey’s games. Cicero’s objective was equally clear: to obliterate Verres’s defenses so completely that by the time he had finished laying out his case, not even the most corrupt senatorial jury in Rome would dare to acquit him.

He set about this mission with his usual discipline. The prosecution team would gather before dawn. While Cicero performed his exercises, was shaved and dressed, I would read out the testimony of the witnesses he would be calling that day and run through our schedule of evidence. He would then dictate to me the rough outline of what he intended to say. For an hour or two he would familiarize himself with the day’s brief and thoroughly memorize his remarks, while Quintus, Frugi, and I ensured that all his witnesses and evidence boxes were ready. We would then parade down the hill to the Forum-and parades they were, for the general view around Rome was that Cicero’s performance in the extortion court was the greatest show in town. The crowds were as large on the second and third days as they had been on the first, and the witnesses’ performances were often heartbreaking, as they collapsed in tears recounting their ill treatment. I remember in particular Dio of Halaesa, swindled out of ten thousand sesterces, and two brothers from Agyrium forced to hand over their entire inheritance of four thousand. There would have been more, but Lucius Metellus had actually refused to let a dozen witnesses leave the island to testify, among them the chief priest of Jupiter, Heraclius of Syracuse-an outrage against justice which Cicero neatly turned to his advantage. “Our allies’ rights,” he boomed, “do not even include permission to complain of their sufferings!” Throughout all this, Hortensius, amazing to relate, never said a word. Cicero would finish his examination of a witness, Glabrio would offer the King of the Law Courts his chance to cross-examine, and His Majesty would regally shake his head, or declare grandly, “No questions for this witness.” On the fourth day, Verres pleaded illness and tried to be excused from attending, but Glabrio was having none of it, and told him he would be carried down to the Forum on his bed if necessary.

It was on the following afternoon that Cicero’s cousin Lucius at last returned to Rome, his mission in Sicily accomplished. Cicero was overjoyed to find him waiting at the house when we got back from court, and he embraced him tearfully. Without Lucius’s support in dispatching witnesses and boxes of evidence back to the mainland, Cicero’s case would not have been half as strong. But the seven-month effort had clearly exhausted Lucius, who had not been a strong man to begin with. He was now alarmingly thin and had developed a painful, racking cough. Even so, his commitment to bringing Verres to justice was unwavering-so much so that he had missed the opening of the trial in order to take a detour on his journey back to Rome. He had stayed in Puteoli and tracked down two more witnesses: the Roman knight, Gaius Numitorius, who had witnessed the crucifixion of Gavius in Messana; and a friend of his, a merchant named Marcus Annius, who had been in Syracuse when the Roman banker Herennius had been judicially murdered.

“And where are these gentlemen?” asked Cicero eagerly.

“Here,” replied Lucius. “In the tablinum. But I must warn you, they do not want to testify.”

Cicero hurried through to find two formidable men of middle age-“the perfect witnesses from my point of view,” as Cicero afterwards described them, “prosperous, respectable, sober, and above all-not Sicilian.” As Lucius had predicted, they were reluctant to get involved. They were businessmen, with no desire to make powerful enemies, and did not relish the prospect of taking starring roles in Cicero’s great anti-aristocratic production in the Roman Forum. But he wore them down, for they were not fools, either, and could see that in the ledger of profit and loss, they stood to gain most by aligning themselves with the side that was winning. “Do you remember what Pompey said to Sulla, when the old man tried to deny him a triumph on his twenty-sixth birthday?” asked Cicero. “He told me over dinner the other night: ‘More people worship a rising than a setting sun.’” This potent combination of name-dropping and appeals to patriotism and self-interest at last brought them around, and by the time they went in to dinner with Cicero and his family they had pledged their support.

“I knew if I had them in your company for a few moments,” whispered Lucius, “they would do whatever you wanted.”

I had expected Cicero to put them on the witness stand the very next day, but he was too smart for that. “A show must always end with a climax,” he said. He was ratcheting up the level of outrage with each new piece of evidence, having moved on through judicial corruption, extortion, and straightforward robbery to cruel and unusual punishment. On the eighth day of the trial, he dealt with the testimony of two Sicilian naval captains, Phalacrus of Centuripae and Onasus of Segesta, who described how they and their men had escaped floggings and executions by bribing Verres’s freedman Timarchides (present in court, I am glad to say, to experience his humiliation personally). Worse: the families of those who had not been able to raise sufficient funds to secure the release of their relatives had been told they would still have to pay a bribe to the official executioner, Sextius, or he would deliberately make a mess of the beheadings. “Think of that unbearable burden of pain,” declaimed Cicero, “of the anguish that racked those unhappy parents, thus compelled to purchase for their children by bribery not life but a speedy death!” I could see the senators on the jury shaking their heads at this and muttering to one another, and each time Glabrio invited Hortensius to cross-examine the witnesses, and Hortensius simply responded yet again, “No questions,” they groaned. Their position was becoming intolerable, and that night the first rumors reached us that Verres had already packed up the contents of his house and was preparing to flee into exile.

Such was the state of affairs on the ninth day, when we brought Annius and Numitorius into court. If anything, the crowd in the Forum was bigger than ever, for there were now only two days left until Pompey’s great games. Verres came late and obviously drunk. He stumbled as he climbed the steps of the temple up to the tribunal, and Hortensius had to steady him as the crowd roared with laughter. As he passed Cicero’s place, he flashed him a shattered, red-eyed look of fear and rage-the hunted, cornered look of an animal: the Boar at bay. Cicero got straight down to business and called as his first witness Annius, who described how he had been inspecting a cargo down at the harbor in Syracuse one morning when a friend had come running to tell him that their business associate, Herennius, was in chains in the forum and pleading for his life.

“So what did you do?”

“Naturally, I went at once.”

“And what was the scene?”

“There were perhaps a hundred people crying out that Herennius was a Roman citizen and could not be executed without a proper trial.”

“How did you all know that Herennius was a Roman? Was he not a banker from Spain?”

“Many of us knew him personally. Although he had business in Spain, he had been born to a Roman family in Syracuse and had grown up in the city.”

“And what was Verres’s response to your pleas?”

“He ordered Herennius to be beheaded immediately.”

There was a groan of horror around the court.

“And who dealt the fatal blow?”

“The public executioner, Sextius.”

“And did he make a clean job of it?”

“I am afraid he did not, no.”

“Clearly,” said Cicero, turning to the jury, “he had not paid Verres and his gang of thieves a large enough bribe.”

For most of the trial, Verres had sat slumped in his chair, but on this morning, fired by drink, he jumped up and began shouting that he had never taken any such bribe. Hortensius had to pull him down. Cicero ignored him and went on calmly questioning his witness.

“This is an extraordinary situation, is it not? A hundred of you vouch for the identity of this Roman citizen, yet Verres does not even wait an hour to establish the truth of who he is. How do you account for it?”

“I can account for it easily, senator. Herennius was a passenger on a ship from Spain that was impounded with all its cargo by Verres’s agents. He was sent to the Stone Quarries, along with everyone else on board, then dragged out to be publicly executed as a pirate. What Verres did not realize was that Herennius was not from Spain at all. He was known to the Roman community in Syracuse and would be recognized. But by the time Verres discovered his mistake, Herennius could not be allowed to go free, because he knew too much about what the governor was up to.”

“Forgive me, I do not understand,” said Cicero, playing the innocent. “Why would Verres want to execute an innocent passenger on a cargo ship as a pirate?”

“He needed to show a sufficient number of executions.”

“Why?”

“Because he was being paid bribes to let the real pirates go free.”

Verres was on his feet again shouting that it was a lie, and this time Cicero took a few paces toward him. “A lie, you monster? A lie? Then why in your own prison records does it state that Herennius was released? And why do they further state that the notorious pirate captain Heracleo was executed, when no one on the island ever saw him die? I shall tell you why-because you, the Roman governor, responsible for the safety of the seas, were all the while taking bribes from the very pirates themselves!”

“Cicero, the great lawyer, who thinks himself so clever!” said Verres bitterly, his words slurred by drink. “Who thinks he knows everything! Well, here is something you do not know. I have Heracleo in my private custody, here in my house in Rome, and he can tell you all himself that it is a lie!”

Amazing now, to reflect that a man could blurt out something so foolish, but the facts are there-they are in the record-and amid the pandemonium in court, Cicero could be heard demanding of Glabrio that the famous pirate be fetched from Verres’s house by the lictors and placed in proper official custody, “for the public safety.” Then, while that was being done, he called as his second witness of the day Gaius Numitorius. Privately I thought that Cicero was rushing it too much: that he could have milked the admission about Heracleo for more. But the great advocate had sensed that the moment of the kill had arrived, and for months, ever since we had first landed in Sicily, he had known exactly the blade he wished to use. Numitorius swore an oath to tell the truth and took the stand, and Cicero quickly led him through his testimony to establish the essential facts about Publius Gavius: that he was a merchant traveling on a ship from Spain; that his ship had been impounded and the passengers all taken to the Stone Quarries, from which Gavius had somehow managed to escape; that he had made his way to Messana to take a ship to the mainland, had been apprehended as he went aboard, and had been handed over to Verres when he visited the town. The silence of the listening multitudes was intense.

“Describe to the court what happened next.”

“Verres convened a tribunal in the forum of Messana,” said Numitorius, “and then he had Gavius dragged before him. He announced to everyone that this man was a spy, for which there was only one just penalty. Then he ordered a cross set up overlooking the straits to Regium, so that the prisoner could gaze upon Italy as he died, and had Gavius stripped naked and publicly flogged before us all. Then he was tortured with hot irons. And then he was crucified.”

“Did Gavius speak at all?”

“Only at the beginning, to swear that the accusation was not true. He was not a foreign spy. He was a Roman citizen, a councillor from the town of Consa, and a former soldier in the Roman cavalry, under the command of Lucius Raecius.”

“What did Verres say to that?”

“He said that these were lies and commanded that the execution begin.”

“Can you describe how Gavius met his dreadful death?”

“He met it very bravely, senator.”

“Like a Roman?”

“Like a Roman.”

“Did he cry out at all?”

“Only while he was being whipped and he could see the irons being heated.”

“And what did he say?”

“Every time a blow landed, he said, ‘I am a Roman citizen.’”

“Would you repeat what he said, more loudly please, so that all can hear.”

“He said, ‘I am a Roman citizen.’”

“So just that?” said Cicero. “Let me be sure I understand you. A blow lands”-he put his wrists together, raised them above his head, and jerked forward, as if his back had just been lashed-“and he says through gritted teeth, ‘I am a Roman citizen.’ A blow lands”-and again he jerked forward-“‘I am a Roman citizen.’ A blow lands. ‘I am a Roman citizen.’”

The flat words of my transcript cannot hope to convey the effect of Cicero’s performance upon those who saw it. The hush around the court amplified his words. It was as if all of us now were witnesses to this monstrous miscarriage of justice. Some men and women-friends of Gavius, I believe-began to scream, and there was a growing swell of outrage from the masses in the Forum. Yet again, Verres shook off Hortensius’s restraining hand and stood up. “He was a filthy spy!” he bellowed. “A spy! He only said it to delay his proper punishment!”

“But he said it!” said Cicero triumphantly, wheeling on him, his finger jabbing in outrage. “You admit he said it! Out of your own mouth I accuse you-the man claimed to be a Roman citizen, and you did nothing! This mention of his citizenship did not lead you to hesitate or delay, even for a little, the infliction of this cruel and disgusting death! If you, Verres, had been made a prisoner in Persia or the remotest part of India and were being dragged off to execution, what cry would you be uttering, except that you were a Roman citizen? What then of this man whom you were hurrying to his death? Could not that statement, that claim of citizenship, have saved him for an hour, for a day, while its truth was checked? No it could not-not with you in the judgment seat! And yet the poorest man, of humblest birth, in whatever savage land, has always until now had the confidence to know that the cry ‘I am a Roman citizen’ is his final defense and sanctuary. It was not Gavius, not one obscure man, whom you nailed upon that cross of agony: it was the universal principle that Romans are free men!”

The roar that greeted the end of Cicero’s tirade was terrifying. Rather than diminishing after a few moments, it gathered itself afresh and rose in volume and pitch, and I became aware, at the periphery of my vision, of a movement toward us. The awnings under which some of the spectators had been standing began to collapse with a terrible tearing sound. A man dropped off a balcony onto the crowd. There were screams. An unmistakable lynch mob began storming the steps to the platform. Hortensius and Verres stood up so quickly in their panic that they knocked over the bench behind them. Glabrio could be heard yelling that the court was adjourned, then he and his lictors hastened up the remaining steps toward the temple, with the accused and his eminent counsel in undignified pursuit. Some of the jury also fled into the sanctuary of the holy building (but not Catulus: I distinctly remember him standing like a sharp rock, staring unflinchingly ahead, as the current of bodies broke and swirled around him). The heavy bronze doors slammed shut. It was left to Cicero to try to restore order by climbing onto his own bench and gesturing for calm, but four or five men, rough-looking fellows, ran up and seized his legs and lifted him away. I was terrified, both for his safety and my own, but he stretched out his arms as if he was embracing the whole world. When they had settled him on their shoulders they spun him around to face the Forum. The blast of applause was like the opening of a furnace door and the chant of “Cic-er-o! Cic-er-o! Cic-er-o!” split the skies of Rome.

AND THAT, AT LAST, was the end of Gaius Verres. We never learned exactly what went on inside the temple after Glabrio suspended the sitting, but Cicero’s opinion was that Hortensius and Metellus made it clear to their client that further defense was useless. Their own dignity and authority were in tatters: they simply had to cut him adrift before any more harm was done to the reputation of the Senate. It no longer mattered how lavishly he had bribed the jury-no member of it would dare to vote to acquit him after the scenes they had just witnessed. At any rate, Verres slipped out of the temple when the mob had dispersed, and he fled the city at nightfall-disguised, some say, as a woman-riding full pelt for southern Gaul. His destination was the port of Massalia, where exiles could traditionally swap their hard-luck stories and pretend they were on the bay of Naples.

All that remained to do now was to fix the level of his fine, and when Cicero returned home he called a meeting to discuss the appropriate figure. Nobody will ever know the full value of what Verres stole during his years in Sicily-I have heard an estimate of forty million-but Lucius, as usual, was eager for the most radical course: the seizure of every asset Verres possessed. Quintus thought ten million would be about right. Cicero was curiously silent for a man who had just recorded such a stupendous victory, and he sat in his study moodily toying with a metal stylus. Early in the afternoon, we received a message from Hortensius, relaying an offer from Verres to pay one million into court as compensation. Lucius was particularly appalled-“an insult,” he called it-and Cicero had no hesitation in sending the man away with a flea in his ear. An hour later he was back, with what Hortensius called his “final figure”: a settlement of one and a half million. This time, Cicero dictated a longer reply:

From: Marcus Tullius Cicero

To: Quintus Hortensius Hortalus

Greetings!

In view of the ludicrously low sum your client is proposing as compensation for his unparalleled wickedness, I intend asking Glabrio to allow me to continue the prosecution tomorrow, when I shall exercise my right to address the court on this and other matters.

“Let us see how much he and his aristocratic friends relish the prospect of having their noses rubbed further into their own filth,” he exclaimed to me. I finished sealing the letter, and when I returned from giving it to the messenger he set about dictating the speech he proposed to deliver the next day-a slashing attack on the aristocrats for prostituting their great names, and the names of their ancestors, in defense of such a scoundrel as Verres. Urged on by Lucius in particular, he poured out his loathing. “We are aware with what jealousy, with what dislike, the merit and energy of ‘new men’ are regarded by certain of the ‘nobles’; that we have only to shut our eyes for a moment to find ourselves caught in some trap; that if we leave them the smallest opening for any suspicion or charge of misconduct, we have to suffer for it at once; that we must never relax our vigilance, and never take a holiday. We have enemies-let us face them; tasks to perform-let us shoulder them; not forgetting that an open and declared enemy is less formidable than one who hides himself and says nothing!”

“There go another thousand votes,” muttered Quintus.

The afternoon wore on in this way, without any answer from Hortensius, until, at length, not long before dusk, there was a commotion from the street, and soon afterwards Eros came running into the study with the breathless news that Pompey the Great himself was in the vestibule. This was indeed extraordinary, but Cicero and his brother had time to do no more than blink at one another before that familiar military voice could be heard barking, “Where is he? Where is the greatest orator of the age?”

Cicero muttered an oath beneath his breath and went out into the tablinum, followed by Quintus, then Lucius, and finally myself, just in time to see the senior consul come striding out of the atrium. The confines of that modest house made him bulk even larger than he did normally. “And there he is!” he exclaimed. “There is the man whom everyone comes to see!” He made straight for Cicero, threw his powerful arms around him, and embraced him in a bear hug. From where I was standing, just behind Cicero, I could see his crafty gray eyes taking in each of us in turn, and when he released his embarrassed host, he insisted on being introduced, even to me, so that I-a humble domestic slave from Arpinum-could now boast, at the age of thirty-four, that I had shaken hands with both the ruling consuls of Rome.

He had left his bodyguards out in the street and had come into the house entirely alone, a significant mark of trust and favor. Cicero, whose manners as always were impeccable, ordered Eros to tell Terentia that Pompey the Great was downstairs, and I was instructed to pour some wine.

“Only a little,” said Pompey, putting his large hand over the cup. “We are on our way to dinner, and shall only stay a moment. But we could not pass our neighbor without calling in to pay our respects. We have been watching your progress, Cicero, over these past few days. We have been receiving reports from our friend Glabrio. Magnificent. We drink your health.” He raised his cup, but not a drop, I noticed, touched his lips. “And now that this great enterprise is successfully behind you, we hope that we may see a little more of you, especially as I shall soon be merely a private citizen again.”

Cicero gave a slight bow. “That would be my pleasure.”

“The day after tomorrow, for example-how are you placed?”

“That is the day of the opening of your games. Surely you will be occupied? Perhaps some other time-”

“Nonsense. Come and watch the opening from our box. It will do you no harm to be seen in our company. Let the world observe our friendship,” he added grandly. “You enjoy the games, do you not?”

Cicero hesitated, and I could see his brain working through the consequences, both of refusal and of acceptance. But really he had no choice. “I adore the games,” he said. “I can think of nothing I would rather do.”

“Excellent.” Pompey beamed. At that moment Eros returned with a message that Terentia was lying down, unwell, and sent her apologies. “That is a pity,” said Pompey, looking slightly put out. “But let us hope there will be some future opportunity.” He handed me his untouched wine. “We must be on our way. No doubt you have much to do. Incidentally,” he said, turning on the threshold of the atrium, “have you settled on the level of the fine yet?”

“Not yet,” replied Cicero.

“What have they offered?”

“One and a half million.”

“Take it,” said Pompey. “You have covered them in shit. No need to make them eat it, too. It would be embarrassing to me personally and injurious to the stability of the state to proceed with this case further. You understand me?” He nodded in a friendly way and walked out. We heard the front door open and the commander of his bodyguard call his men to attention. The door closed. For a little while, nobody spoke.

“What a ghastly man,” said Cicero. “Bring me another drink.”

As I fetched the jug, I saw Lucius frowning. “What gives him the right to talk to you like that?” he asked. “He said it was a social visit.”

“‘A social visit!’ Oh, Lucius!” Cicero laughed. “That was a visit from the rent collector.”

“The rent collector? What rent do you owe him?” Lucius might have been a philosopher, but he was not a complete idiot. He realized then what had happened. “Oh, I understand!” A look of utter disgust came across his face, and he turned away.

“Spare me your superiority,” said Cicero, catching his arm. “I had no choice. Marcus Metellus had just drawn the extortion court. The jury was bribed. The hearing was fixed to fail. I was this far”-Cicero measured an inch with his thumb and forefinger-“from abandoning the whole prosecution. And then Terentia said to me ‘make your speech shorter’ and I realized that was the answer-to produce every document and every witness, and do it all in ten days, and shame them-that was it, Lucius: you understand me?-shame them before the whole of Rome, so they had no alternative except to find him guilty.”

In such a way did he speak, working all his persuasive powers on his cousin as if Lucius were a one-man jury which he needed to convince, reading his face, trying to find within it clues to the right words and arguments which would unlock his support.

“But Pompey,” said Lucius bitterly. “After what he did to you before!”

“All I needed, Lucius, was one thing-one tiny, tiny favor-and that was the assurance that I could proceed as I wished and call my witnesses straightaway. No bribery was involved; no corruption. I just knew I had to be sure to secure Glabrio’s consent beforehand. But I could hardly, as the prosecutor, approach the praetor of the court myself. So I racked my brains: who could?”

Quintus said, “There was only one man in Rome, Lucius.”

“Exactly. Only one man to whom Glabrio was honor-bound to listen. The man who had given him his son back, when his divorced wife died-Pompey.”

“But it was not a tiny favor,” said Lucius. “It was a massive interference. And now there is a massive price to be paid for it-and not by you, but by the people of Sicily.”

“The people of Sicily?” repeated Cicero, beginning to lose his temper. “The people of Sicily have never had a truer friend than me. There would never have been a prosecution without me. There would never have been an offer of one and a half million without me. By heaven, Gaius Verres would have been consul in two years’ time but for me! You cannot reproach me for abandoning the people of Sicily!”

“Then refuse his rent,” said Lucius, seizing hold of his hand. “Tomorrow, in court, press for the maximum damages, and to hell with Pompey. You have the whole of Rome on your side. That jury will not dare to go against you. Who cares about Pompey? In five months’ time, as he says himself, he will not even be consul. Promise me.”

Cicero clasped Lucius’s hand fervently in both of his and gazed deep into his eyes-the old double-grip sincere routine, which I had seen so often in this very room. “I promise you,” he said. “I promise you I shall think about it.”

PERHAPS HE DID THINK ABOUT IT. Who am I to judge? But I doubt it can have occupied his thoughts for more than an instant. Cicero was no revolutionary. He never desired to set himself at the head of a mob, tearing down the state: and that would have been his only hope of survival, if he had turned Pompey against him as well as the aristocracy. “The trouble with Lucius,” he said, putting his feet up on the desk after his cousin had gone, “is that he thinks politics is a fight for justice. Politics is a profession.”

“Do you think Verres bribed Pompey to intervene, to lower the damages?” asked Quintus, voicing exactly the possibility that had occurred to me.

“It could be. More likely he simply wants to avoid being caught in the middle of a civil war between the people and the Senate. Speaking for myself, I would be happy to seize everything Verres possesses, and leave the wretch to live on Gaulish grass. But that is not going to happen, so we had better see how far we can make this one and a half million stretch.”

The three of us spent the rest of the evening compiling a list of the most worthy claimants, and after Cicero had deducted his own costs, of close to one hundred thousand, we reckoned he could just about manage to fulfill his obligations, at least to the likes of Sthenius, and to those witnesses who had traveled all the way to Rome. But what could one say to the priests? How could one put a price on looted temple statues made of gems and precious metals, long since broken up and melted down by Verres’s goldsmiths? And what payment could ever recompense the families and friends of Gavius and Herennius and the other innocents he had murdered? The work gave Cicero his first real taste of what it is like to have power-which is usually, when it comes down to it, a matter of choosing between equally unpalatable options-and fairly bitter he found it.

We went down to court in the usual manner the following morning, and there were the usual big crowds in their usual places-everything the same, in fact, except for the absence of Verres, and the presence of twenty or thirty men of the magistrates’ patrol, stationed around the perimeter of the tribunal. Glabrio made a short speech, opening the session and warning that he would not tolerate any disturbances similar to those which had occurred the previous day. Then he called on Hortensius to make a statement.

“Due to ill health,” he began, and there was the most wonderful shout of laughter from all sides. It was some time before he was able to proceed. “Due to ill health,” he repeated, “brought on by the strain of these proceedings, and wishing to spare the state any further disruption, my client, Gaius Verres, no longer proposes to offer a defense to the charges brought by the special prosecutor.”

He sat down. There was applause from the Sicilians at this concession, but little response from the spectators. They were waiting to take their lead from Cicero. He stood, thanked Hortensius for his statement-“somewhat shorter than the speeches he is in the habit of making in these surroundings”-and demanded the maximum penalty under the Cornelian Law: a full loss of civil rights, in perpetuity, “so that never again can the shadow of Gaius Verres menace his victims or threaten the just administration of the Roman republic.” This elicited the first real cheer of the morning.

“I wish,” continued Cicero, “that I could undo his crimes and restore to both men and gods all that he has robbed from them. I wish I could give back to Juno the offerings and adornments of her shrines at Melita and Samos. I wish Minerva could see again the decorations of her temple at Syracuse. I wish Diana’s statue could be restored to the town of Segesta, and Mercury’s to the people of Tyndaris. I wish I could undo the double injury to Ceres, whose images were carried away from both Henna and Catina. But the villain has fled, leaving behind only the stripped walls and bare floors of his houses here in Rome and in the country. These are the only assets that can be seized and sold. His counsel assesses the value of these at one and a half million sesterces, and this is what I must ask for and accept as recompense for his crimes.”

There was a groan, and someone shouted, “Not enough!”

“It is not enough. I agree. And perhaps some of those in this court who defended Verres when his star was rising, and who promised him their support if they found themselves among his jurors, might inspect their consciences-might inspect, indeed, the contents of their villas!”

This brought Hortensius to his feet to complain that the prosecutor was talking in riddles.

“Well,” responded Cicero in a flash, “as Verres equipped him with an ivory sphinx, the consul-elect should find no difficulty solving riddles.”

It cannot have been a premeditated joke, as Cicero had no idea what Hortensius was going to say. Or perhaps, on second thought, having written that, I am being naïve, and it was actually part of that store of spontaneous witticisms which Cicero regularly laid up by candlelight to use should the opportunity arise. Whatever the truth, it was proof of how important humor can be on a public occasion, for nobody now remembers a thing about that last day in court except Cicero’s crack about the sphinx. I am not even sure, in retrospect, that it is particularly funny. But it brought the house down and transformed what could have been an embarrassing speech into yet another triumph. “Sit down quickly”: that was always Molon’s advice when things were going well, and Cicero took it. I handed him a towel and he mopped his face and dried his hands as the applause continued. And with that, his exertions in the prosecution of Gaius Verres were at an end.

THAT AFTERNOON, the Senate met for its final debate before it went into a fifteen-day recess for Pompey’s games. By the time Cicero had finished smoothing matters over with the Sicilians, he was late for the start of the session, and we had to run together from the Temple of Castor right across the Forum to the Senate House. Crassus, as the presiding consul for the month, had already called the house to order and was reading the latest dispatch from Lucullus on the progress of the campaign in the East. Rather than interrupt him by making a conspicuous entry, Cicero stood at the bar of the chamber, and we listened to Lucullus’s report. The aristocratic general had, by his own account, scored a series of crushing victories, entering the kingdom of Tigranes, defeating the king himself in battle, slaughtering tens of thousands of the enemy, advancing deeper into hostile territory to capture the city of Nisibis, and taking the king’s brother as hostage.

“Crassus must feel like throwing up,” Cicero whispered to me gleefully. “His only consolation will be to know that Pompey is even more furiously jealous.” And indeed, Pompey, sitting beside Crassus, his arms folded, did look sunk in a gloomy reverie.

When Crassus had finished speaking, Cicero took advantage of the lull to enter the chamber. The day was hot, and the shafts of light from the high windows lit jeweled swirls of midges. He walked purposefully, head erect, watched by everyone, down the central aisle, past his old place in obscurity by the door, toward the consular dais. The praetorian bench seemed full, but Cicero stood patiently beside it, waiting to claim his rightful place, for he knew-and the house knew-that the ancient reward for a successful prosecutor was the assumption of the defeated man’s rank. I do not know how long the silence went on, but it seemed an awfully long time to me, during which the only sound came from the pigeons in the roof. It was Afranius who finally beckoned to him to sit beside him, and who cleared sufficient space by roughly shoving his neighbors along the wooden seat. Cicero picked his way across half a dozen pairs of outstretched legs and wedged himself defiantly into his place. He glanced around at his rivals, and he met and held the gaze of each. No one challenged him. Eventually someone rose to speak, and in a grudging voice congratulated Lucullus and his victorious legions-it might have been Pompey, now I come to think of it-and gradually the low drone of background conversation resumed. I close my eyes and I see their faces still in the golden light of that late summer afternoon-Cicero, Crassus, Pompey, Hortensius, Catulus, Catilina, the Metellus brothers-and it is hard for me to believe that they, and their ambitions, and even the very building they sat in, are now all so much dust.