Political Speeches (Oxford World's Classics) (16 page)

[66] Publius Servilius
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alone captured more pirate captains alive than all governors before him put together—and was anyone ever deprived of the enjoyment of viewing a captured pirate? On the contrary, wherever he journeyed he presented everyone with the gratifying spectacle of captured enemies in chains. The result was that crowds flocked from all over to witness the sight, coming not just from the towns on the route, but from neighbouring ones as well. And why do you think his triumph was the most popular and welcome one that the Roman people have ever experiened? Because there is nothing sweeter than victory, and there is no more definite proof of victory than seeing the people you have many times been afraid of being led in chains to their execution.

[67] Why, then, did you not do this? Why was that pirate kept out of sight as if it would have been sacrilege to let him be seen? Why did you not execute him? For what purpose did you let him live? Do you know of any pirate captain who has ever been captured in Sicily in the past and not been beheaded? Go on, cite me one precedent for what you have done, give me one example. You kept the pirate captain alive—why? To have him led before your chariot, I suppose, at your triumph—for after the magnificent fleet of the Roman people had been lost and the province plundered, there would of course have been nothing for it but for the senate to grant you a naval triumph!

[68] All right, then, he preferred this novel procedure of keeping the pirate captain a prisoner rather than follow the normal practice and have him beheaded. So to what sort of imprisonment was the man subjected? With whom was he kept and in what conditions? You have all heard of the quarries at Syracuse,
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and most of you have seen them. They are a colossal, stupendous piece of work, the creation of kings and tyrants. They consist of an astonishingly deep excavation into the rock, cut by a vast force of workers. Nowhere so shut in, nowhere so completely enclosed, nowhere so secure for keeping men under guard could possibly be created or imagined. All who are officially to be kept in custody, even people from the other Sicilian states, are ordered to be taken down into those quarries.

[69] Now Verres had imprisoned a number of Roman citizens in this place, and he had also ordered the rest of the pirates to be held there. He therefore realized that, if he were also to imprison there this man who was only masquerading as the pirate captain,
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many of those in the quarries would start asking questions about where the real pirate captain was. He did not dare, therefore, to send his fake pirate to this best and most secure of prisons. Indeed, he felt nervous about imprisoning him anywhere in Syracuse. So he sent him to—where? Lilybaeum perhaps? Ah, I see; Verres did not feel nervous about all coastal communities, only Syracuse. No, it was not Lilybaeum, gentlemen. Panhormus, then? So I hear; although since the pirate was captured off Syracuse, Syracuse was the proper place for his imprisonment—if not for his execution. But no, it was not Panhormus even. [70] So where was it? Where do you imagine? The fake pirate was sent to a place where the inhabitants have no reason to fear and be anxious about pirates, to people who have nothing to do with shipping and maritime matters—to Centuripae.
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The Centuripans are an entirely inland people, predominantly farmers, who have never had any cause to worry about seagoing pirates. In fact, the only pirate captain they were afraid of during your governorship was one who confined his piratical activities to dry land—Apronius!
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Anyway, to allow the fake pirate to pass himself off without any trouble or difficulty as the real one, Verres ordered the Centuripans to supply him with food and everything else he needed on the most generous and lavish scale—thus giving the game away entirely and letting everyone see what it was that he had done.

[71] The Syracusans, however, being educated and canny people, were able not merely to see what was obvious, but to make inferences about what was being hidden from them. So each day they counted up the number of pirates who were executed. They calculated the total that there should have been from the size of the ship that had been captured and the number of its oars. Verres, having removed and spirited away all those who had any technical skill or were at all good looking, reckoned that there would be a general outcry if he followed the normal practice and tied all the remaining pirates to the post
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at the same time, given that far more had been taken away than not. He had therefore decided to bring them out at different times in dribs and drabs. Nevertheless, there was no one in the entire city who did not keep a note of the running total, and not merely notice
the ones that were missing, but actively ask for them and demand that they be produced.

[72] Since there were a great many pirates missing, this wicked defendant therefore began to put others in the place of the pirates he had taken away to his own house, substituting Roman citizens that he had previously cast into prison. Some of these, he claimed, were soldiers from the army of Sertorius
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who had fled from Spain and put in at Sicily. Others were people who had been trading or were at sea for some other reason, and had themselves been captured by the pirates: Verres made out that they were with the pirates of their own volition. Of these Roman citizens, some were dragged out of prison to meet their deaths at the post with their heads covered up, to prevent their being recognized; others were recognized by numerous Roman citizens who all spoke out in their defence—but the men were nevertheless beheaded. I will talk about their terrible torture and cruel deaths when I come to that topic; and I shall speak so powerfully that if in protesting against the defendant’s savagery and the shameful deaths of those Roman citizens my strength or even my life should fail me, I would still consider it a glorious and worthwhile thing to have spoken out in this manner.

[73] This, then, is Verres’ achievement, this his glorious victory: a pirate galley captured, its captain freed, musicians sent to Rome, good looking young men and those with particular skills sent to the governor’s house, their places taken by an equal number of Roman citizens who are tortured and executed as if they were enemies, all the textiles removed, and all the gold and silver taken away and appropriated.

But how he incriminated himself in the first hearing! For many days he said nothing at all. Then when the worthy Marcus Annius
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testified in the course of his evidence that a Roman citizen had been beheaded but that the pirate captain had not, Verres suddenly sprang up, roused by his knowledge of the crime he had committed and also by the madness that his misdeeds had inspired in him, and declared that he had been well aware that he would be accused of having taken a bribe not to execute the real pirate captain, and that was why he had not executed him—and he added that there were, at his house,
two
pirate captains!
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[74] What mercy the Roman people showed you—or rather, what astonishing and unparalleled forbearance! A Roman equestrian, Marcus Annius, declares that you beheaded a
Roman citizen: you do not deny it. He says that you failed to execute a pirate captain: you admit it. Gasps and shouting can be heard from everyone; but the Roman people then check themselves and refrain from inflicting immediate punishment on you, leaving the necessary measures for their own safety
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to be taken instead by the strict jurors of this court.

And you knew that you would be accused of committing a crime? How did you know this? What reason did you have for thinking it? You had no particular enemy—and if you did, your way of life was surely not so bad as to make you afraid of being brought to justice. Or perhaps, as is often the case, it was your awareness of your own guilt that made you timid and suspicious? All right, when you were governor, you were terrified of being accused and put on trial. But if that is the case, can you really now seriously doubt, when so many witnesses are demonstrating your guilt, that you are going to be convicted?

[75] But if you were really afraid of being accused of not executing the real pirate captain but executing a substitute instead, which possible course of action did you think would leave you with a stronger line of defence—producing at your trial, on my compulsion and insistence, in front of people who did not know him, and long after the event, a man whom everyone had only your word for it that he was a pirate captain at all, or executing the man at Syracuse, immediately after the event, in front of people who recognized him, and with virtually the whole of Sicily looking on? Notice how big a difference it makes which of these courses of action was adopted. With the latter, no one could criticize you; but the former leaves you with no defence. That is why all previous governors have always adopted the latter policy—and I would like to know who prior to you, who apart from you has ever adopted the former.

You kept that pirate alive. For how long? For the remainder of your period of office. For what purpose, according to what precedent, and for what reason did you keep him as long as that? Why, I repeat, when those Roman citizens whom the pirates had captured were beheaded at once, did you allow those same pirates to enjoy the right to life for so long? [76] All right; let us concede that you could do as you liked for as long as you were governor. But even as a private citizen, even when on trial, even on the point of conviction did you still venture to keep enemy commanders in your own private house?
For one month, for two months, in the end for almost a year after they were captured, those pirates stayed at your house. And there they would be still, if it had not been for me—if, that is, it had not been for Manius Glabrio,
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who granted my request and ordered that the men should be given up and consigned to prison. What legal right, what custom, what precedent is there for such a course of action? Here we have a fierce and bitter enemy of the Roman people, the common enemy of all mankind. Shall any human being be entitled, when only a private citizen, to keep an enemy like that at his own house, and inside the walls of Rome?

[77] Now let us imagine that the day before I forced you to admit that you had beheaded Roman citizens and then let the pirate captain live and stay at your house—let us imagine, as I say, that on the day before I made you admit that, he managed to escape from your house and succeeded in raising an armed force against the state. If that had happened, what would you now be saying? ‘He stayed at my house, he lived with me. I kept him alive and unharmed for my trial, to make it easier for me to refute the charges my enemies would bring against me.’ Really? Will you put the whole country in danger, just to make it easier for you to escape your own private dangers? Will you give defeated enemies their proper punishment at a time to suit yourself, rather than to suit the country? Will the enemy of the Roman people be kept in private custody? Triumphing generals, it is true, keep enemy commanders alive for a time so that they can lead them in their triumphs and allow the Roman people to view the impressive spectacle and reap the fruits of victory. But even so, when they start to turn their chariots out of the forum and up to the Capitol, they give orders for the captives to be taken over to the prison, and one and the same day thus brings an end both to the command of the victor and to the life of the vanquished.

[78] You tell us that you were certain you were going to have to face trial. So I take it that no one could possibly doubt that you would ever have let the pirate captain escape execution, thus allowing him to live on and so present a serious danger to you—one you could see before your very eyes. For suppose the pirate had died (and you say that you were afraid of being prosecuted): who would then have believed your defence? It would be established that no one at Syracuse had actually seen the pirate captain, but that everyone was wondering where he was. No one would doubt that you had taken a
sum of money to set him free. It would have been rumoured that a substitute had been put in his place whom you were trying to pass off as the real pirate. You yourself would have admitted that you had long been afraid of being accused of doing exactly this. So if you suddenly announced that the man had died, who would have believed you? [79] Even as it is, when you produce this captive of yours, whoever he is, alive, you will be laughed out of court. And suppose he had escaped, suppose he had broken his chains like that king of pirates, Nico, whom Publius Servilius
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miraculously captured and then no less miraculously recaptured: what would you now be saying? But the crux of the matter is this: if the real pirate had been beheaded, you would not have got your money; but if this fake one had died or escaped, it would not have been difficult for you to put another substitute in his place.

I have said more than I intended to about this pirate captain. Even so, I have passed over the strongest proofs of Verres’ guilt on this particular charge. This is because I want to keep the whole charge separate: there is a separate place, a separate law, and a separate court
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in which this matter will be dealt with.

[80] Acquiring so much loot and gaining so much wealth in the form of slaves, silver, and textiles did not make Verres any more conscientious in equipping the fleet or in calling up and provisioning the sailors—even though, in addition to making his province safer, that might have resulted in more plunder for himself.
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The height of summer is the time when other governors normally travelled around the province from place to place or even, in view of the concern about the pirates and the danger they posed, put to sea themselves. But at this time of year Verres judged that his own royal residence
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was not sufficient to satisfy his expensive and dissolute tastes. To spend the summer in the style to which he had become accustomed, he gave orders, as I have already said, that a series of marquees made out of linen sheeting should be sited along the shore—the shore, that is, of the Island at Syracuse,
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beyond the spring of Arethusa, next to the mouth and entrance of the harbour, a delightful spot, and safe from prying eyes.