by Cicero
[27] But when spring came round—whose arrival he discerned not from the west wind, nor from the stars, but when he saw the first roses:* that was for him the first sign of spring—then at that point he turned to the laborious business of travelling. And in this he proved himself so tough and energetic that no one ever saw him riding on a horse. Instead, as the Bithynian kings used to do, he had himself conveyed by eight bearers in a litter, one which boasted a diaphanous divan of Maltese wool, stuffed with rose petals. He wore one garland on his head, another round his neck, and to his nostrils he clasped a delicate, fine-meshed linen sachet, again filled with rose petals. Whenever he arrived at some town, after completing his march in the manner described, he had himself carried in this same litter straight into the bedroom. There the Sicilian magistrates would come to visit him, there the Roman equestrians would come, as you have heard from numerous sworn witnesses. Legal disputes were submitted to him there in secret, and shortly afterwards his decisions were carried forth. Then when a short time later he had finished making legal rulings in his bedroom—on considerations of money, not justice—he concluded that he owed the rest of his time to Venus and to Bacchus.
[28] While we are on this subject I think I should not pass over our glorious general’s outstanding, unique diligence. For I have to tell you that, in all the towns in Sicily where governors stay and hold assizes, there is none in which a woman from a respectable family was not specially selected to satisfy his lusts. Some of these were openly brought to his table, while any who were more modest in their behaviour came later at a prearranged time, avoiding the light and the crowd of people. His dinner parties were not the quiet affairs one expects with governors and generals, nor the decorous occasions that magistrates put on, but were noisy and bad-mannered events; sometimes they even descended into hand-to-hand fighting. For this strict, diligent governor, although he never obeyed the laws of the Roman people, carefully observed all the drinking rules that are prescribed at parties. And his entertainments generally ended up with someone being carried from the feast as if from the battlefield, someone else being left for dead, and the majority sprawling, with no awareness of who or where they were—so that anyone who saw them would believe that they were looking not at a governor’s official dinner, but at an outrage reminiscent of Cannae.*
[29] As soon as midsummer arrived, the period which all previous governors of Sicily have always spent travelling, believing that to be the best time for inspecting the province, when the grain is on the threshing-floor—because that is when the slaves are all brought into one place and can see how many of them there are, and that is when their work is particularly onerous, and the sheer volume of the grain makes an impression on them, and the time of year does not stand in their way*—at this time, I tell you, when the other governors have always kept on the move, this general of an entirely new type built himself a fixed camp in the loveliest part of Syracuse.
[30] At the mouth of the harbour, where the gulf from the open sea begins to turn inwards from the coast towards the city,* he sited a series of marquees made out of linen sheeting. Moving out of the governor’s residence, which was the former palace of King Hiero,* he took up residence here instead, and during that whole period no one ever saw him in any other place. The only people who were allowed access to it were those who could share in, or satisfy, his lust. Here flocked all the women with whom he had been passing his time (and it is remarkable what a large number of them there were in Syracuse);* here came the men, too, who were worthy to be his friends—worthy, that is, to share in his style of life and his revelries. It was among men and women of this sort that his teenage son socialized, so that even if his nature made him less like his father, his nurture and habits made him his father’s son.
[31] The arrival here of the woman Tertia, separated from her Rhodian piper by violence and trickery,* is said to have caused great disruption in Verres’ camp. The aristocratic wife of Cleomenes of Syracuse and the wife of Aeschrio,* a woman of good family, took exception to the inclusion of the daughter of Isidorus the pantomime actor within their social circle. But this Hannibal here thought that in his camp promotion should be by merit and not by birth,* and indeed he thought so highly of this woman Tertia that he actually took her away with him when he returned home from his province.
Throughout this period while, dressed in a purple Greek cloak and a tunic down to the ankles, he was enjoying himself with his women, nobody minded or took it amiss that the governor was absent from the forum, legal disputes were not being heard, and the courts were not in session. That place by the shore might re-echo all around with women’s voices and the sound of music, and in the forum the silence of the courts and the law might be complete—but nobody minded. For it seemed to them as if what was absent from the forum was not legal business, but violence, brutality, and the cruel and shocking plundering of their property.
[32] So you are basing your defence on his ability as a general, Hortensius? Are you trying to hide his thefts, his robberies, his greed, his cruelty, his arrogance, his criminality, and his wickedness behind his great achievements and his glory as a general? I suppose I should be afraid that at the end of your speech you will have recourse to that old oratorical trick which Antonius was the first to use,* that you will bring Verres forward, bare his chest, and let the Roman people gaze on his scars—women’s love-bites, the evidence of his wickedness and sexual excess! [33] I beg the gods that you actually will have the gall to bring up his military service, his service in war! Then the whole of his military career will be exposed, and you will find out not only how he conducted himself when he was in command, but how he behaved in the ranks. His early ‘service’ will be gone over again, the period when he used to be pulled out of the forum rather than, as he himself maintains, pulled in it.* The camp of the gambler from Placentia* will be mentioned, a place where he was on duty so regularly that his pay was stopped. Indeed, his many financial losses from his time in the ranks will be referred to—debts which were paid off and discharged from the proceeds of his youth.
[34] Eventually he became hardened by his submission to this sort of disgrace, by which time others—though not himself—had tired of it. Do you really need me to tell you what kind of a man he was by that stage, and how many well-guarded strongholds of modesty and chastity he captured by force and recklessness? And do you really want me to tell you of scandals which dishonoured other people too? I will not do this, gentlemen; I will pass over all these things that took place some time ago. Two scandals only I will put before you, recent ones which do not reflect badly on anyone else; and from them you will be able to come to your own conclusions about everything that I leave out. The first is so famous and universally well known that no peasant coming to Rome from his home town on legal business during the consulship of Lucius Lucullus and Marcus Cotta* would have been unaware of it—that all the judgements of the city praetor were decided on the say-so of the tart Chelido. The other is that when Verres had already left the city in his general’s cloak, and had already pronounced the solemn vows for his tenure of office and the general welfare of the country, he used to have himself carried back inside the city* in a litter at night, in order to commit adultery with a woman who was married to one man but available to everyone. This practice was against morality, against the auspices, and against every religious principle human and divine.
[35] Immortal gods, how people differ from one another in their minds and ways of thinking! In my own case, when I took on those public offices which the Roman people have so far entrusted me with, I considered myself bound by obligations of the most solemn kind—and may I forfeit your backing, and that of the Roman people, for my intentions and aspirations during the rest of my life if this is not the case! When I was elected to the quaestorship,* I considered that that office had not merely been granted me, but had been entrusted to me and invested in me. While I was carrying out my duties as quaestor in the province of Sicily I supposed that everyone’s eyes w
ere looking at me alone. I felt that I and my quaestorship were being presented before the whole world as if on a theatre stage. And I consistently denied myself everything that is regarded as pleasurable—not merely the immoderate desires of the present day, but even such comforts as are natural and necessary.
[36] I am now aedile-elect, and fully conscious of the responsibility which the Roman people have placed on me. I must put on, with the greatest reverence and care, the holy games for Ceres, Liber, and Libera; I must win the favour of our mother Flora for the Roman people and plebs by providing well-attended games; I must put on, with the greatest dignity and solemnity, the ancient games for Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, games which were the earliest ones to be described as ‘Roman’;* and I must look after the sacred temples and protect the whole of the city. In return for the effort and anxiety which these duties entail, I have been given certain benefits: precedence in being called for my opinion in the senate, the purplebordered toga, the curule chair, and the right to hand down a portrait mask of myself to posterity.* [37] But although I hope that all the gods will be well disposed towards me, and although the office granted to me by the Roman people is in itself something which gives me great pleasure, nevertheless all these benefits, gentlemen, give me more anxiety and worry than enjoyment. For I am anxious that this aedileship itself should not appear to have been given to me simply because it had to be given to one or other of the candidates who stood for it, but should seem instead to have been rightly assigned and bestowed in the proper quarter by the considered judgement of the people.
[38] But you, when your election as praetor* was announced, however that was achieved (I will pass over that and say nothing about what actually went on)—when, as I say, your election was announced, were you not stirred by the voice of the crier? When time after time he proclaimed that the centuries of seniors and juniors had endowed you with that office,* did it not make you reflect that a certain part of the state had been entrusted to you, and that for that one year you would have to keep away from the house of a prostitute? And when you were then allotted the job of city praetor,* did you never think how much work, how much responsibility this would involve? Did you never consider—if you could ever rouse yourself sufficiently to consider anything—that this job, which it would be difficult enough for a man of exceptional wisdom and integrity to do, had been given to someone of supreme stupidity and wickedness? No, you did not. And so far from banishing Chelido from your house during your praetorship, you in fact spent the whole of that year in hers.
[39] Next came your provincial governorship. As governor, it never occurred to you that those rods and axes,* the absolute power of your office, and all those symbols of rank and prestige had not been given to you simply to allow you to break down every barrier of duty and restraint, to view everybody’s property as plunder for yourself, and to make it impossible for anyone’s possessions to be safe, anyone’s home secure, anyone’s life protected, or anyone’s chastity guarded against your greed and wickedness. As governor, you behaved in such a way that now, when you are caught out, you are forced to take refuge in a war against fugitives.* But by now you will have realized that, far from being a defence, this is an important source of charges against you—unless of course you intend to talk about the remnants of the slave war in Italy and the setback at Tempsa,* something which would have been a golden opportunity for you if you had possessed any courage or energy, instead of which you proved yourself to be just as you had always been.
[40] The people of Vibo Valentia came to see you, and their spokesman, the eloquent and high-ranking Marcus Marius, begged you to take the situation in hand. Since you had the title of praetor and a praetor’s powers, he wanted you to act as their chief and leader in suppressing the small gang of rebels. However, not only did you shrink from the task, but all the time that you were there on the coast, that woman Tertia, whom you were carrying back to Rome with you, could be seen by everyone. And not only that: when you were giving your official reply, on a matter of such importance, to the citizens of such a well-known, respectable town as Vibo Valentia, you wore a workman’s smock and a Greek cloak.*
What do you think of his behaviour when he was leaving for his province,* what do you think of his behaviour in the province itself, when you see him, returning from that province not to hold a triumph but to face trial, and not even bothering to avoid disgrace for the sake of something* which can scarcely have given him any particular pleasure? [41] How divinely inspired were those murmurs of disapproval at the crowded meeting of the senate in the temple of Bellona!* You will remember, gentlemen, how it was drawing towards evening, and the bad news had just been brought in about Tempsa. We did not have anyone with military authority who could be sent there, and then someone said that Verres was not far from there: remember how strongly everyone murmured their disapproval, and how openly the leading senators opposed the suggestion! So does the man who has now been proved guilty by so many charges and so much evidence place any hope at all in the secret votes of all those jurors who, even before they had heard this evidence, openly voiced their condemnation?
[42] So there it is. He has gained no credit from the war against the runaway slaves, or from the threat of that war, because in Sicily there was no such war, or any danger of a war, nor did he take any steps to prevent one happening. ‘But he did keep the fleet properly equipped for a war against the pirates, and he devoted exceptional care to this matter, so the province was indeed brilliantly defended by the defendant during his governorship.’ I will tell you about the war against the pirates, members of the jury, and about the Sicilian fleet. But I wish first to state that under this single heading are numbered all his worst crimes of greed, treason, insanity, lust, and brutality. Please be so kind as to pay me close attention, as you have done up to this point, while I briefly set out these matters for you.
[43] I wish to state, first, that the naval defence of Sicily was run not with the intention of defending the province, but as a means of using the fleet to make money. Earlier governors used to require the various states to provide ships and a stated number of soldiers and sailors—yet from the extremely important and wealthy state of Messana you required none of these things. How much money the people of Messana secretly gave you in return we shall find out later, if that seems a sensible plan, from their own witnesses and accounts.
[44] I can further reveal that an enormous vessel, as big as a trireme, a very beautiful, well-equipped merchant ship was quite openly built at public expense to your order, that the whole of Sicily knew about it, and that it was presented and handed over to you free of charge by the chief magistrate and senate of Messana. While Verres was on his way home, this ship, loaded with his loot from Sicily—and indeed itself part of that loot—put in at Velia* with its substantial cargo, including those items which he did not want to send on in advance to Rome with his other thefts because they were of particularly high value and especially treasured by himself. I saw this ship myself at Velia not long ago, and many others have seen it too, a beautiful, well-equipped vessel, gentlemen—one which appeared to everyone who set eyes on it to be already looking forward to its master’s exile, and getting ready for his escape.
[45] What answer do you have for me on this point? Except possibly the one which, although it does not excuse you at all, a man on trial for extortion would have to give—that the ship was built at your own expense. Go on, say this: you have no alternative. Do not worry, Hortensius, that I am going to ask what right a senator had to build a ship. The laws which forbid this* are old—‘dead letters’, as you are fond of saying. It is a long time since our country was like that; it is a long time since our courts were so strict that prosecutors considered that charge one of the more serious ones. In the first place, then, what did you want a ship for? If you are going somewhere on public service, ships are provided at public expense for you to travel in in safety. And unless you are on public service, you are not permitted to travel anywhere at all,* nor t
o transport goods over the sea from places where you are not allowed to own them. [46] Secondly, why did you acquire something when it was against the law? This charge would have counted strongly against you in the days when strict moral standards prevailed in our country. But now not only do I decline to make this a charge against you, I do not even make a general criticism of you, as well I might, on lines such as these. Did you consider that there would be nothing shameful, nothing blameworthy, nothing offensive in having a cargo ship built for yourself openly in a centre of population in a province of which you were the governor? What did you suppose those who saw it would say, those who heard about it think? That you were going to sail that ship to Italy empty? That you were going to set up a shipping concern when you arrived back in Rome? Nor could anyone suppose that you had an estate on the coast of Italy, and were acquiring a ship of such great capacity merely to take your produce to market. No, you were perfectly happy to have everyone talking about you, saying openly that you were acquiring that vessel in order to ship your loot out of Sicily, and then to keep coming back again to collect the thefts you had left behind.