Imperium (13 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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