His own parents, Caesar reflected much later that evening, when he had retired to his room and lay unclothed upon his bed, had always been rather distant figures. A father rarely home who when he was home seemed more intent upon conducting some sort of undeclared war upon his wife than in establishing a rapport with any of his children; and a mother who was unfailingly just, unsparingly critical, unable to give physical affection. Perhaps, thought Caesar from his present vantage point, that had been a large part of his father's inexplicable but patent disapproval of his mother her fleshly coolness, her aloofness. What the young man could not see, of course, was that the real root of his father's dissatisfaction had lain in his wife's unstinting love for her work as landlady work he considered utterly beneath her. Because they had never not known Aurelia the landlady, Caesar and his sisters had no idea how this side of her had galled their father. Instead, they had equated their father's attitude with their own starvation for hugs and kisses; for they could not know how pleasurable were the nights their parents spent together. When the dreadful news had come of the father's death borne as it had been by the bearer of his ashes Caesar's immediate reaction had been to take his mother in his arms and comfort her. But she had wrenched herself away and told him in clipped accents to remember who he was. It had hurt until the detachment he had inherited from her asserted itself, told him that he could have expected no other behavior from her. And perhaps, thought Caesar now, that was no more than a sign of something he had noticed all around him that children always wanted things from their parents that their parents were either not willing to give, or incapable of giving. His mother was a pearl beyond price, he knew that. Just as he knew how much he loved her. And how much he owed her for pointing out to him perpetually where the weaknesses lay within him not to mention for giving him some wonderfully worldly and unmaternal advice. And yet and yet... How lovely it was to be greeted with hugs and kisses and unquestioning affection, as Nicomedes and Oradaltis had greeted him today. He didn't go so far as to wish consciously that his own parents had been more like them; he just wished that they had been his parents. This mood lasted until he broke the night's fast with them on the next morning, and the light of day revealed the wish's manifest absurdity. Sitting looking at King Nicomedes, Caesar superimposed his own father's face upon the King's (in deference to Caesar, Nicomedes had not painted himself), and wanted to laugh. As for Oradaltis a queen she might be, but not one tenth as royal as Aurelia. Not parents, he thought then: grandparents. It was October when he had arrived in Nicomedia and he had no plans to move on quickly, much to the delight of the King and Queen, who strove to fall in with all their guest's wishes, be it to visit Gordium, Pessinus, or the marble quarries on the island of Proconnesus. But in December, when Caesar had been in Bithynia two months, he found himself asked to do something very difficult and passing strange.
In March of that year the new governor of Cilicia, the younger Dolabella, had started out from Rome to go to his province in the company of two other Roman noblemen and a retinue of public servants. The more important of his two companions was his senior legate, Gaius Verres; the less important was his quaestor, Gaius Publicius Malleolus, apportioned to his service by the lots. One of Sulla's new senators through election as quaestor, Malleolus was by no means a New Man; there had been consuls in his family, there were imagines in his atrium. Of money, however, there was little; only some lucky buys in the proscriptions had enabled the family to pin their hopes on the thirty year old Gaius, whose duty was to restore the family's old status by rising to the consulship. Knowing how small Gaius's salary would be and how expensive maintaining the younger Dolabella's life style was going to be, his mother and sisters sold their jewels to plump out Malleolus's purse, which he intended to plump out further when he reached his province. And the women had eagerly pushed on him the greatest family treasure left, a magnificent collection of matching gold and silver plate. When he gave a banquet for the governor, the ladies said, it would increase his standing to use the family plate. Unfortunately Gaius Publicius Malleolus was not as mentally capable as earlier men of his clan had been; he possessed a degree of gullible naivete that did not bode well for his survival in the forefront of the younger Dolabella's retinue. No slouch, the senior legate Gaius Verres had assessed Malleolus accurately before the party had got as far as Tarentum, and cultivated the quaestor with such charm and winning ways that Malleolus deemed Verres the best of good fellows. They traveled together with another governor and his party going to the east: the new governor of Asia Province, Gaius Claudius Nero; a patrician Claudius, he had more wealth but far less intelligence than that prolific branch of the patrician Claudii cognominated Pulcher. Gaius Verres was hungry again. Though he had (thanks to prior knowledge of the area) done very well out of proscribing major landowners and magnates around Beneventum, he owned a genuine passion for works of art which Beneventum had not assuaged. The proscribed of Beneventum had been on the whole an untutored lot, as content with a mawkish Neapolitan copy of some sentimental group of nymphs as with a Praxiteles or a Myron. At first Verres had watched and waited for the proscription of the grandson of the notorious Sextus Perquitienus, whose reputation as a connoisseur was quite unparalleled among the knights, and whose collection thanks to his activities as a tax farmer in Asia was perhaps even better than the collection of Marcus Livius Drusus. Then the grandson had turned out to be Sulla's nephew; the property of Sextus Perquitienus was forever safe. Though his family was not distinguished his father was a pedarius on the back benches of the Senate, the first Verres to belong to that body Gaius Verres had done remarkably well thanks to his instinct for being where the money was and his ability to convince certain important men of his worth. He had easily fooled Carbo but had never managed to fool Sulla, though Sulla had not scrupled to use him to ruin Samnium. Unfortunately Samnium was as devoid of great works of art as Beneventum; that side of Verres's insatiably avaricious character remained unappeased. The only place to go, decided Verres, was to the east, where a Hellenized world had scattered statues and paintings literally everywhere from Alexandria to Olympia to Pontus to Byzantium. So when Sulla had drawn the lots for next year's governors, Verres had weighed up his chances and opted for cultivating the younger Dolabella. His cousin the elder Dolabella was in Macedonia a fruitful province when it came to works of art but the elder Dolabella was a hard man, and had his own aims. Gaius Claudius Nero, going to Asia Province, was a bit of a stickler for the right thing. Which left the next governor of Cilicia, the younger Dolabella. Exactly the material for a Gaius Verres, as he was greedy, unethical, and a secret participant in vices which involved dirty smelly women of the most vulgar kind and substances capable of enhancing sensuous awareness. Long before the journey to the east actually began, Verres had made himself indispensable to Dolabella in pursuing his secret vices. Luck, thought Verres triumphantly: he had Fortune's favor! Men like the younger Dolabella were not many, nor on the whole did they usually rise so high. Had not the elder Dolabella proven militarily helpful to Sulla, the younger would never have gained praetorship and province. Of course praetorship and province had been grabbed at, but the younger Dolabella lived in constant fear; so when Verres showed himself as sympathetic as he was resourceful, Dolabella sighed in relief. While the party had traveled in conjunction with Claudius Nero, Verres had metaphorically bound his itching hands to his sides and resisted the impulse to snatch this work from a Greek sanctuary and that work from a Greek agora. In Athens especially it had been difficult, so rich was the treasure trove all around; but Titus Pomponius Atticus sat like a huge spider at the center of the Roman web which enveloped Athens. Thanks to his financial acumen, his blood ties to the Caecilii Metelli, and his many gifts to Athens, Atticus was not a man to offend, and his condemnation of the kind of Roman who plundered works of art was well known. But when they left Athens by ship there came the parting of the ways with Claudius Nero, who was anxious to reach Pergamum and not by nature a Grecophile. So Claudius Nero'
s ship sped as fast as it could to Asia Province, while Dolabella's ship sailed to the tiny island of Delos. Until Mithridates had invaded Asia Province and Greece nine years earlier, Delos had been the epicenter of the world's slave trade. There all the bulk dealers in slaves had set up shop, there came the pirates who provided the eastern end of the Middle Sea with most of its slaves. As many as twenty thousand slaves a day had changed hands in the old Delos, though that had not meant an endless parade of slave filled vessels choking up the neat and commodious Merchant Harbor. The trading was done with bits of paper, from transfers of ownership of slaves to the moneys paid over. Only special slaves were transported to Delos in person; the island was purely for middlemen. There had used to be a large Italo Roman population there, as well as many Alexandrians and a considerable number of Jews; the largest building on Delos was the Roman agora, wherein the Romans and Italians who conducted business on Delos had located their offices. These days it was windswept and almost deserted, as was the western side of the isle, where most of the houses clustered because the weather was better. In terraces up the slopes of Mount Cynthus were the precincts and temples of those gods imported to Delos during the years when it had lain under the patronage of the Ptolemies of Egypt and the Seleucids of Syria. A sanctuary of Artemis, sister of Apollo, lay closest to the smaller of the two harbors, the Sacred Harbor, in which only the ships of pilgrims anchored. Beyond this, going north, was the mighty and wonderful precinct of Apollo huge, beautiful, stuffed with some of the greatest works of art known. And between Apollo's temple and the Sacred Lake lay the white Naxian marble lions which flanked the Processional Way linking the two. Verres went wild with delight, could not be prised from his explorations. He flitted from one temple to another, marveling at the image of Ephesian Artemis loaded down with bulls' testicles like sterile pendulous breasts, astonished at the goddess Ma from Comana, at Sidonian Hecate, at Alexandrian Serapis, literally drooling at images in gold and chryselephantine, at gem studded oriental thrones on which, it seemed, the original occupants must have sat cross legged. But it was inside the temple of Apollo that he found the two statues he could not resist a group of the satyr Marsyas playing his rustic pipes to an ecstatic Midas and an outraged Apollo, and an image in gold and ivory of Leto holding her divine babies said to have been fashioned by Phidias, master of chryselephantine sculpture. Since these two works of art were small, Verres and four of his servants stole into the temple in the middle of the night before Dolabella was due to sail, removed them from their plinths, wrapped them tenderly in blankets, and stowed them in that part of the ship's hold wherein were deposited the belongings of Gaius Verres. "I'm glad Archelaus sacked this place, and then Sulla after him," said a pleased Verres to Malleolus at dawn. "If the slave trade still made a hive of activity out of Delos, it would be far harder to walk about undetected and do a little acquiring, even in the night marches." A little startled, Malleolus wondered what Verres meant, but a look at that perversely beautiful honey colored face did not encourage him to ask. Not half a day later, he knew. For a wind had risen suddenly which prevented Dolabella's sailing, and before it had blown itself out the priests of Apollo's precinct had come to Dolabella crying that two of the god's most prized treasures had been stolen. And (having remarked for how long Verres had prowled about them, stroking them, rocking them on their bases, measuring them with his eyes) they accused Verres of the deed. Horrified, Malleolus realized that the allegation was justified. Since he liked Verres, it went hard with Malleolus to go to Dolabella and report what Verres had said, but he did his duty. And Dolabella insisted that Verres return the works. "This is Apollo's birthplace!" he said, shivering. "You can't pillage here. We'll all die of disease." Balked and in the grip of an overmastering rage, Verres "returned" the works by tossing them over the side of the ship onto the stony shore. Vowing that Malleolus would pay. But only to himself; much to Malleolus's surprise, Verres came to thank him for preventing the deed. "I have such a lust for works of art that it is a great trouble to me," said Verres, golden eyes warm and moist. "Thank you, thank you!" His lust was not to be thwarted again, however. In Tenedos (which Dolabella had a fancy to visit because of the part the isle had played in the war against Troy) Verres appropriated the statue of Tenes himself, a beautiful wooden creation so old it was only remotely humanoid. His new technique was candid and unapologetic: "I want it, I must have it!" he would say, and into the ship's hold it would go while Dolabella and Malleolus sighed and shook their heads, unwilling to cause a rift in what was going to be a long and necessarily closely knit association. In Chios and in Erythrae the looting occurred again; so did Verres's services to Dolabella and Malleolus, the latter now being steadily drawn into a corruption which Verres had already made irresistible to Dolabella. So when Verres decided to remove every work of art from the temple and precinct of Hera in Samos, he was able to persuade Dolabella to hire an extra ship and to order the Chian admiral Charidemus, in command of a quinquereme, to escort the new governor of Cilicia's flotilla on the rest of its journey to Tarsus. No pirates must capture the swelling number of treasures! Halicarnassus lost some statues by Praxiteles the last raid Verres made in Asia Province, now buzzing like an angry swarm of wasps. But Pamphylia lost the wonderful Harper of Aspendus and most of the contents of the temple of Artemis at Perge here, deeming the statue of the goddess a poorly executed thing, Verres contented himself with stripping its coat of gold away and melting it down into nicely portable ingots. And so at last they came to Tarsus, where Dolabella was glad to settle into his palace and Verres glad to commandeer a villa for himself wherein the treasures he had pillaged could be put on display for his delectation. His appreciation of the works was genuine, he had no intention of selling a single one; simply, in Gaius Verres the obsessions and amoralities of the fanatical collector reached a height hitherto unknown. Gaius Publicius Malleolus too was glad to find himself a nice house beside the river Cydnus; he unpacked his matching gold and silver plate and his moneybags, for he intended to augment his fortune by lending money at exorbitant rates of interest to those who could not borrow from more legitimate sources. He found Verres enormously sympathetic and enormously helpful. By this time Dolabella had sunk into a torpor of gratified sensuality, his thought processes permanently clouded by the Spanish fly and other aphrodisiac drugs Verres supplied him, and content to leave the governing of his province to his senior legate and his quaestor. Displaying sufficient sense to leave the art of Tarsus alone, Verres concentrated upon revenge. It was time to deal with Malleolus. He introduced a subject close to the hearts of all Romans the making of a will. "I lodged my new one with the Vestals just before I left," said Verres, looking particularly attractive with the light of a chandelier turning his softly curling hair into old gold. I presume you did the same, Malleolus?" "Well, no," Malleolus answered, flustered. "I confess the thought never occurred to me." "My dear fellow, that's insanity!" cried Verres. "Anything can happen to a man away from home, from pirates to illnesses to shipwreck look at the Servilius Caepio who drowned on his way home twenty five years ago he was a quaestor, just like you!" Verres slopped more fortified wine into Malleolus's beautiful vermeil cup. "You must make a will!" And so it went while Malleolus grew drunker and drunker and Verres appeared to. When the senior legate decided Dolabella's foolish quaestor was too befuddled to read what he was signing, Verres demanded paper and pen, wrote out the dispositions Gaius Publicius Malleolus dictated, and then assisted him to sign and seal. The will was tucked into a pigeonhole in Malleolus's study and promptly forgotten by its author. Who, not four days later, died of an obscure malady the Tarsian physicians finally elected to call food poisoning. And Gaius Verres, producing the will, was surprised and enchanted to discover that his friend the quaestor had left him everything he owned, including the family plate. "Dreadful business," he said to Dolabella sadly. "It's a very nice legacy, but I'd rather poor Malleolus was still here." Even through his aphrodisiac induced haze Dolabella sensed a touch of hypocrisy, but
confined his words to wondering how he was going to get another quaestor from Rome in a hurry. "No need!" said Verres cheerfully. "I was Carbo's quaestor, and good enough at the job to be prorogued as his proquaestor when he went to govern Italian Gaul. Appoint me proquaestor.'' And so the affairs of Cilicia not to mention Cilicia's public purse passed into the hands of Gaius Verres. All through the summer Verres worked industriously, though not for the good of Cilicia; it was his own activities that benefited, particularly the moneylending he had taken over from Malleolus. However, the art collection remained static. Even Verres at that point in his career was not quite confident enough to foul his own nest by stealing from towns and temples in Cilicia itself. Nor could he at least while Claudius Nero remained its governor begin again to plunder Asia Province; the island of Samos had sent an angry deputation to Pergamum to complain to Claudius Nero about the pillaging of Hera's sanctuary, only to be told regretfully that it was not in Claudius Nero's power to punish or discipline the legate of another governor, so the Samians would have to refer their complaint to the Senate in Rome. It was late in September that Verres had his inspiration; he then lost no time in turning fancy into fact. Both Bithynia and Thrace abounded in treasures, so why not increase his art collection at the expense of Bithynia and Thrace? Dolabella was persuaded to appoint him ambassador at large and issue him with letters of introduction to King Nicomedes of Bithynia and King Sadala of the Thracian Odrysiae. And off Verres set at the start of October, overland from Attaleia to the Hellespont. This route avoided Asia Province and might besides yield a little gold from temples along the way, even if no desirable art. It was an embassage composed entirely of villains; Verres wanted no honest, upright characters along. Even the six lictors (to whom as an ambassador with propraetorian status Verres was entitled) he chose with great care, sure they would aid and abet him in all his nefarious undertakings. His chief assistant was a senior clerk on Dolabella's staff, one Marcus Rubrius; Verres and Rubrius had already had many dealings together, including the procurement of Dolabella's dirty smelly women. His slaves were a mixture of big fellows to heft heavy statues around and little fellows to wriggle into locked rooms, and his scribes were only there to catalogue whatever he purloined. The journey overland was disappointing, as Pisidia and that part of Phrygia he traversed had been thoroughly looted by the generals of Mithridates nine years before. He debated swinging wider onto the Sangarius to see what he could filch at Pessinus, but in the end elected to head straight for Lampsacus on the Hellespont. Here he could commandeer one of Asia Province's warships to act as escort, and sail along the Bithynian coast loading whatever he found and fancied onto a good stout freighter. The Hellespont was a small slice of No Man's Land. Technically it belonged to Asia Province, but the mountains of Mysia cut it off on the landward side, and its ties were more with Bithynia than with Pergamum. Lampsacus was the chief port on the Asian side of the narrow straits, almost opposite to Thracian Callipolis; here the various armies which crossed the Hellespont made their Asian landfall. In consequence Lampsacus was a big and busy port, though a great measure of its economic prosperity lay in the abundance and excellence of the wine produced in the Lampsacan hinterland. Nominally under the authority of the governor of Asia Province, it had long enjoyed independence, Rome being content with a tribute. There was as always in every prosperous settlement on every shore of the Middle Sea a contingent of Roman merchants who lived there permanently, but the government and the major wealth of Lampsacus rested with its native Phocaean Greeks, none of whom held the Roman citizenship; they were all socii, allies. Verres had diligently researched every likely place along his route, so when his embassage arrived in Lampsacus he was well aware of its status and the status of its leading citizens. The Roman cavalcade which rode into the port city from the hills behind it caused an immediate stir almost verging on a panic; six lictors preceded the important Roman personage, who was also accompanied by twenty servants and a troop of one hundred mounted Cilician cavalry. Yet no warning of its advent had been received, and no one knew what its purpose in Lampsacus might be. One Ianitor was chief ethnarch that year; word that a full Roman embassage was awaiting him in the agora sent Ianitor flying there posthaste, together with some of the other city elders. "I'm not sure how long I'll be staying," said Gaius Verres, looking handsome, imperious, and not a little arrogant, "but I require fitting lodgings for myself and my people." It was impossible, Ianitor explained hesitantly, to find a house large enough to take everyone, but he himself would of course accommodate the ambassador, his lictors and body servants, while the rest were boarded with other households. Ianitor then introduced his fellow elders, including one Philodamus, who had been chief ethnarch of Lampsacus during Sulla's time there. "I hear," said the clerk Marcus Rubrius low voiced to Verres as they were being escorted to the mansion of Ianitor, "that the old man Philodamus has a daughter of such surpassing beauty and virtue that he keeps her shut away. Name of Stratonice." Verres was no Dolabella when it came to bodily appetites. As with his statues and paintings, he liked his women to be pure and perfect works of art, Galateas come to life. In consequence he tended when not in Rome to go for long periods without sexual satisfaction, since he would not content himself with inferior types of women, even famous courtesans like Praecia. As yet he was unmarried, intending when he did to own a bride of splendid lineage and peerless beauty a modern Aurelia. This trip to the east was going to cement his fortune and make it possible to negotiate a suitable marital alliance with some proud Caecilia Metella or Claudia Pulchra. A Julia would have been the best, but all the Julias were taken. Thus it was months since Verres had enjoyed a sexual flutter, nor had he expected to find one in Lampsacus. But Rubrius had made it his business to find out the weaknesses of Verres aside from inanimate works of art and had done a little whispering in any gossipy looking ears as soon as the embassage had ridden into town. To find that Philodamus had a daughter, Stratonice, who was quite the equal of Aphrodite herself. "Make further enquiries," said Verres curtly, then put on his most charmingly false smile as he came to Ianitor's door, where the chief ethnarch waited in person to welcome him. Rubrius nodded and went off in the wake of the slave to his own quarters, less august by far; he was, after all, a very minor official with no ambassadorial status. After dinner that afternoon Rubrius reappeared at the house of Ianitor and sought a private interview with Verres. "Are you comfortable here?" asked Rubrius. "More or less. Not like a Roman villa, however. A pity none of the Roman citizens in Lampsacus ranks among the richest. I hate making do with Greeks! They're too simple for my taste. This Ianitor lives entirely on fish didn't even produce an egg or a bird for dinner! But the wine was superb. How have you progressed in the matter of Stratonice?" "With great difficulty, Gaius Verres. The girl is a paragon of every virtue, it seems, but perhaps that's because her father and brother guard her like Tigranes the women in his harem." "Then I'll have to go to dinner at Philodamus's place." Rubrius shook his head emphatically. "I'm afraid that won't produce her, Gaius Verres. This town is Phocaean Greek to its core. The women of the family are not shown to guests." The two heads drew together, honey gold and greying black, and the volume of the conversation dropped to whispers. "My assistant Marcus Rubrius," said Verres to Ianitor after Rubrius had gone, "is poorly housed. I require better quarters for him. I hear that after yourself, the next man of note is one Philodamus. Please see that Marcus Rubrius is relocated in the house of Philodamus first thing tomorrow." "I won't have the worm!" snapped Philodamus to Ianitor when Ianitor told him what Verres wanted. Who is this Marcus Rubrius? A grubby little Roman clerk! In my days I've housed Roman consuls and praetors even the great Lucius Cornelius Sulla when he crossed the Hellespont that last time! In fact, I've never housed anyone as unimportant as Gaius Verres himself! Who is he after all, Ianitor? A mere assistant to the governor of Cilicia!" "Please, Philodamus, please!" begged Ianitor. "For my sake! For the sake of our city! This Gaius Verres is a nasty fellow, I feel it in my bones. And he has a hundr
ed mounted troopers with him. In all Lampsacus we couldn't raise half that many competent professional soldiers." So Philodamus gave in and Rubrius transferred his lodgings. But it had been a mistake to give in, as Philodamus soon discovered. Rubrius hadn't been inside the house for more than a few moments before he was demanding to see the famous beautiful daughter, and, denied this privilege, immediately began to poke and pry through Philodamus's spacious dwelling in search of her. This proving fruitless, Rubrius summoned Philodamus to him in his own house as if he had been a servant. "You'll give a dinner for Gaius Verres this afternoon and serve something other than course after course of fish! Fish is fine in its place, but a man can't live on it. So I want lamb, chicken, other fowls, plenty of eggs, and the very best wine." Philodamus kept his temper. "But it wasn't easy," he said to his son, Artemidorus. "They're after Stratonice," said Artemidorus, very angry. "I think so too, but they moved so quickly in foisting this Rubrius clod on me that I had no opportunity to get her out of the house. And now I can't. There are Romans creeping round our front door and our back door." Artemidorus wanted to be present at the banquet for Verres, but his father, looking at that stormy face, understood that his presence would worsen the situation; after much cajoling, the young man agreed to hie himself off and eat elsewhere. As for Stratonice, the best father and son could do was to lock her in her own room and put two strong servants inside with her. Gaius Verres arrived with his six lictors, who were posted on duty in front of the house while a party of troopers was sent to watch the back gate. And no sooner was the Roman ambassador comfortable upon his couch than he demanded that Philodamus fetch his daughter. "I cannot do that, Gaius Verres," said the old man stiffly. "This is a Phocaean town, which means our womenfolk are never put in the same room as strangers." "I'm not asking that she eat with us, Philodamus," said Verres patiently. "I just want to see this paragon all of your Phocaean town talks about." "I do not know why they should, when they have never seen her either," Philodamus said. "No doubt your servants gossip. Produce her, old man!" "I cannot, Gaius Verres." Five other guests were present, Rubrius and four fellow clerks; no sooner had Philodamus refused to produce his child than they all shouted to see her. The more Philodamus denied them, the louder they shouted. When the first course came in Philodamus seized the chance to leave the room, and sent one of his servants to the house where Artemidorus was eating, begging that he come home to help his father. No sooner had the servant gone than Philodamus returned to the dining room, there to continue obdurately refusing to show the Romans his daughter. Rubrius and two of his companions got up to look for the girl; Philodamus stepped across their path. A pitcher of boiling water had been set upon a brazier near the door, ready to be poured into bowls in which smaller bowls of food might be reheated after the trip from the kitchen. Rubrius grabbed the pitcher and tipped boiling water all over Philodamus's head. While horrified servants fled precipitately, the old man's screams mingled with the shouts and jeers of the Romans, forming up to go in search of Stratonice. Into this melee the sounds of another intruded. Artemidorus and twenty of his friends had arrived outside his father's door, only to find Verres's lictors barring their entry. The prefect of the decury, one Cornelius, had all the lictor's confidence in his own inviolability; it never occurred to him for a moment that Artemidorus and his band would resort to force to remove them from before the door. Nor perhaps would they have, had Artemidorus not heard the frightful screams of his scalded father. The Lampsacans moved in a mass. Several of the lictors sustained minor hurts, but Cornelius died of a broken neck. The banquet participants scattered when Artemidorus and his friends ran into the dining room, clubs in their hands and murder on their faces. But Gaius Verres was no coward. Pushing them contemptuously to one side, he quit the house in company with Rubrius and his fellow clerks to find one dead lictor sprawled in the road surrounded by his five frightened colleagues. Up the street the ambassador hustled them, the body of Cornelius lolling in their midst. By this the whole town was beginning to stir, and Ianitor himself stood at his open front door. His heart sank when he saw what the Romans carried, yet he admitted them to his house and prudently barred the gate behind them. Artemidorus had stayed to tend to his father's injuries, but two of his friends led the rest of the band of young men to the city square, calling on others to meet them as they marched. All the Greeks had had enough of Gaius Verres, and even a fervent speech from Publius Tettius (the town's most prominent Roman resident) could not dissuade them from retaliation. Tettius and his houseguest Gaius Terentius Varro were swept aside, and the townspeople surged off in the direction of Ianitor's house. There they demanded entry. Ianitor refused, after which they battered at the gate with a makeshift ram to no effect, and decided instead to burn the place down. Kindling and logs of wood were piled against the front wall and set alight. Only the arrival of Publius Tettius, Gaius Terentius Varro and some other Roman residents of Lampsacus prevented disaster; their impassioned pleading cooled the hottest heads down sufficiently to see that immolation of a Roman ambassador would end in worse than the violation of Stratonice. So the fire (which had gained considerable hold on the front part of Ianitor's house) was put out, and the men of Lampsacus went home. A less arrogant man than Gaius Verres would have fled from the seething Greek city as soon as he deemed it safe to leave, but Gaius Verres had no intention of running; instead he sat down calmly and wrote to Gaius Claudius Nero, the governor of Asia Province, steeled in his resolve not to be beaten by a pair of dirty Asian Greeks. I demand that you proceed forthwith to Lampsacus and try the two socii Philodamus and Artemidorus for the murder of a Roman ambassador's chief lictor," he said. But swift though the letter's journey to Pergamum was, it was still slower than the detailed report Publius Tettius and Gaius Terentius Varro had jointly provided to the governor. "I will certainly not come to Lampsacus," said Claudius Nero's reply to Verres. "I have heard the real story from my own senior legate, Gaius Terentius Varro, who considerably outranks you. A pity perhaps that you weren't burned to death. You are like your name, Verres a pig." The rage in which Verres wrote his next missive added venom and power to his pen; this one was to Dolabella in Tarsus and it reached Tarsus in a scant seven days, couriered by a petrified trooper who was so afraid of what Verres might do to him if he tarried that he was fully prepared to do murder in order to obtain a fresh horse every few hours. "Go to Pergamum at once, and at a run," Verres instructed his superior without formal salute or evidence of respect. "Fetch Claudius Nero to Lampsacus without a moment's delay to try and execute the socii who murdered my chief lictor. If you don't, I will have words to say in Rome about certain debaucheries and drugs. I mean it, Dolabella. And you may tell Claudius Nero that if he does not come to Lampsacus and convict these Greek fellatores, I will accuse him of sordid practices as well. And I'll make the charges stick, Dolabella. Don't think I won't. If I die for it, I'll make the charges stick."
3. Fortune's Favorites Page 48