‘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 to shift all at once 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, 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 strenuous 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 honour, 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 honour for an utter rascal who is no kin of yours at all? Because I tell you this: Verres has been going round 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 me 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 on the jury.
‘Today the eyes of the world are upon us, waiting to see how far the conduct of each man among us wil
l 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 its 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 offences 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 memorise 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 made the most of it, giving a heart-wringing account of the way Verres had abused his hospitality, stolen his property, trumped up charges against him, fined him and 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 can’t 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 didn’t 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 cat-calls 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 on every side by their enemies, battered day after day by a rain of missiles, and with tunnels undermining their crumbling walls. They had no means of fighting back. Their only hope was somehow to withstand the onslaught for the full 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 defences 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 familiarise himself with the day’s brief and thoroughly memorise 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 Heraclius of Syracuse, the chief priest of Jupiter – 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 attendance, 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 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 he 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 know 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 won them round, and by the time they went into 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. By now 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 Centuripa and Onasus of Segesta, who described how they and their men had only 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 rumours reached us that Verres had already packed up the contents of his house and was preparing to flee into exile.
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