Political Speeches (Oxford World's Classics) (21 page)

But what, gentlemen, was the reason Verres himself put forward
for his outrageous cruelty? The same reason that his defence team will offer shortly. Whenever anyone arrived in Sicily with a significant quantity of goods, he declared that they were soldiers in the service of Sertorius that had fled from Dianium.
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These new arrivals then sought to avert the danger in which they found themselves by laying out their wares—Tyrian purple, incense, perfumes, linen, precious stones, pearls, Greek wines, slaves from Asia—so that people would see from these items where it was that they had come from. But the men did not foresee that the very goods which they supposed would demonstrate their innocence would actually be the cause of their destruction. For Verres announced that they had come by this property as a result of their friendship with the pirates, and he ordered the men to be cast into the quarries. He took particular care, however, to preserve their ships and cargoes.

[147] As a result of this practice, the prison was soon full of merchants; and then there followed what you have already heard the exceptionally distinguished Roman equestrian Lucius Suettius
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testify to, and what you will hear others testify to also. In that prison, Roman citizens had their necks broken—an unspeakable crime. And in their case the traditional cry, ‘I am a Roman citizen’—an appeal which has many times brought assistance and release to many people when among barbarians in the furthest corners of the earth—served only to bring forward these men’s punishment, and to lead to a more agonizing death.

So, Verres, how are you planning to reply to this? Surely you cannot argue that I am lying, that I have made any of it up, that I am exaggerating what happened? Surely you will not dare to suggest to your advocates here that they argue on these lines? Go on, please at least let me have the copy of the records of Syracuse which he is hugging so tightly, which he supposes has been written to suit his purposes. Let me have the prison record which has been so carefully composed, and which shows the date on which each prisoner was taken into custody, and the date on which he died or was executed.

(
The records of Syracuse are read to the court
.)

[148] You see how Roman citizens were herded into the quarries in groups, you see how your own fellow-citizens were stacked up
en masse
in that degrading place. Now see if there is any shred of evidence that any of them ever left it. There is none. Did they all, then, die of natural causes? Even if that were a possible line of
defence,
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it would strain the bounds of credibility too far. But in those very records there occurs a word which this blinkered barbarian was incapable of noticing, or of understanding had he noticed it. ‘Edikaiōthēsan,’ it says, an expression used in Sicily to mean ‘punished by execution’.
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[149] If any king, if any foreign state, if any savage tribe had acted in this way towards Roman citizens, surely we would be taking official action to punish them, surely we would be declaring war on them? Could we really let such damage and such an insult to the honour of Rome go unpunished and unavenged? How many major wars do you think our ancestors undertook merely because word had reached them that Roman citizens had been hurt, ship-owners arrested, or merchants robbed? But I am not now complaining that these men were arrested; nor do I regard it as intolerable that they were robbed. My charge is that, after their ships, slaves, and goods had been taken from them, merchants were put in chains, and, while in chains, despite being Roman citizens, they were killed. [150] Now if I were discussing the dreadful executions of all those Roman citizens not in front of a large crowd of Roman citizens, nor before the country’s most senior senators, nor in the forum of the Roman people, but in front of an audience of Scythians, the hearts even of barbarians such as those could not fail to be deeply moved. For this empire of ours is so glorious and the very name of ‘Roman’ carries such tremendous prestige among every nation on earth that it seems wrong that anyone at all should be allowed to treat our own people with that sort of cruelty.

How can I now think you have any means of escape, any place of refuge available to you, when I see you entwined by these strict jurors and completely netted
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by this crowd of Roman citizens? [151] But if, by Hercules, you manage to free yourself from my snare and somehow extricate yourself by some strategem—something I do not consider remotely possible—then you will only stumble into an even larger net, and then I from a more commanding position
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will inevitably dispatch you and cut you to pieces.

But suppose I were willing to allow him the plea he will make in his own defence. That plea, which is false, ought to be no less damaging to him than my accusation, which is true. So what is this plea he will make? It is this: that the people he intercepted and punished were fugitives from Spain.
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So who gave you permission to punish
them? By what right did you do so? Who else acted in the same way as you? What was the legal basis for your action? [152] We see the forum and the public halls full of that type of men,
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and are not disturbed by the sight. For when our civil dissension or collective madness or bad luck or national calamity (whatever you choose to call it) comes to an end, we do not regard as intolerable an outcome in which those citizens who have survived are allowed to live on unharmed. But Verres (a man who in his earlier career himself betrayed a consul, changed sides when quaestor, and embezzled public money)
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regarded himself as such an authority on matters of public policy that he would have inflicted a painful and cruel death on all such people—men whom the senate, the Roman people, and every magistrate had permitted to appear in the forum, to vote, to reside in Rome, and to take part in political life—if they had had the bad luck to end up in any part of Sicily.
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[153] After Perperna
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had been killed, a large number of soldiers who had fought for Sertorius threw themselves on the mercy of the illustrious and valiant Gnaeus Pompeius. And of these, was there any that Pompeius did not do his very best to keep safe and unharmed? Was there any fellow-citizen who appealed for clemency to whom that undefeated right hand did not extend its protection and offer hope of being spared? Well? When he, a man whom they had fought against in battle, granted them a safe haven, did you, who by constrast had never done your country any important service, see fit to inflict on them torture and death instead? What a promising line of defence you have devised for yourself! By Hercules, I would prefer it if the case you were arguing were proved to the jury and the Roman people to be true, rather than the case I am alleging. I would prefer it, I tell you, if you were believed to be implacably hostile to that type of men
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rather than to merchants and ship-owners. For my argument merely proves you to have been over-greedy; your own defence, on the other hand, convicts you of a type of monstrous frenzy, of unprecedented cruelty, and virtually of a new proscription.
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[154] But it is not open to me, gentlemen, to make use of this defence of Verres’ for my own purposes; it is not open to me.
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This is because the whole of Puteoli
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is here in court. Merchants, wealthy and honourable men, have come to the court in large numbers to tell you that their business partners or their freedmen or their fellow freedmen were stripped of their property and cast into prison, and
that some of them were killed in prison and others taken out and beheaded. See now how fairly I am going to treat you. I am going to bring forward Publius Granius
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as a witness. He will state that his freedmen were beheaded by you, and he will demand that you give him back his ship and his cargo. If you can refute his testimony, please do so. I declare that I will then abandon my witness, take your side, and give you my support. Prove that those men were with Sertorius, and that they fled from Dianium before putting in at Sicily. There is nothing that I would rather you proved—because no other crime that could be discovered or adduced would merit greater punishment.

[155] If you like, I will also bring back the Roman equestrian Lucius Flavius
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to give evidence, since in the first hearing you did not cross-examine him or indeed any of the witnesses. (Your advocates keep saying what a wise innovation this was on your part. But everyone knows the real reason: you knew that you were guilty and that my witnesses were reliable.) Cross-examine Flavius, if you like. Ask him who Titus Herennius was—the man whom Flavius says was a banker at Lepcis,
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and who, despite having more than a hundred Roman citizens of Syracuse who not only vouched for his being who he said he was but also wept and appealed to you on his behalf, was nevertheless beheaded in the presence of the city’s entire population. I would like to see you refute this witness of mine, and demonstrate conclusively that Herennius was in reality a soldier from Sertorius’ army.

[156] But what can we say about the many people who were led out for execution as if they were captured pirates, but had their heads covered up? Can you explain that unprecedented precaution, and your reason for devising it? Could it be that you were rattled by the outcry from Lucius Flavius and everyone else when Titus Herennius was executed? Or could it be that the considerable influence enjoyed by the highly respected and honourable Marcus Annius
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had made you a little more cautious and circumspect? He was the one who recently stated in his evidence that it was no stranger from abroad that you had beheaded, but a Roman citizen who had been born in Syracuse, and who was personally known to all the other Roman citizens there. [157] After all these people’s protests, when the executions had become widely known and widely objected to, Verres did not become more lenient in his punishments, but more
cautious: he started leading Roman citizens out to execution with their heads covered up. But he still wanted to kill them in public because, as I said earlier, the Roman citizens in Syracuse were keeping rather too careful a tally of the numbers of pirates accounted for.

So was this the deal for the Roman plebs while you were governor? Was this the end result of their trading that they were to look forward to? Was this the critical situation in which they lived their lives? Do merchants not have to undergo quite enough natural dangers already without having to worry about these extra risks at the hands of our magistrates in our own provinces? Sicily is our loyal neighbour, filled with steadfast allies and honourable citizens, and she has always been most happy to welcome any Roman citizen within her borders. So was it right that people who had sailed all the way from far-off Syria or Egypt, who had been treated with no little respect by barbarian peoples because they wore the toga, and who had escaped being ambushed by the pirates and wrecked by storms should have been beheaded on their arrival in Sicily—when they reckoned that at last they had come home?

[158] Now what am I to say, members of the jury, about Publius Gavius from the town of Consa?
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What power of voice am I to use, what weighty words, what heart-rending emotion? I feel no lack of emotion on this subject; so my task will rather be to ensure that my voice and my words do justice to the affair, and to my feelings. The charge to which I now turn is so extraordinary that, when it was first brought to me, I did not think I would be able to make use of it. This was because, although I knew it to be completely true, I did not think anyone else would believe it. Yet I was impelled to take action by the tears of all the Roman citizens who do business in Sicily, and was urged on by the evidence presented to me by the honourable citizens of Vibo Valentia and all the people of Regium, as well as by numerous Roman equestrians who happened to be in Messana at the time. The result was that I used the minimum number of witnesses necessary in the first hearing to ensure that no one could be in any doubt as to what had happened.

[159] But what am I to do now? I have been speaking for hours on a single topic, Verres’ appalling cruelty. I have nearly exhausted my entire stock of words appropriate to his crimes in saying what I have said so far, and I have done nothing to vary the nature of the charges and so keep you interested. How, then, am I to speak about such an
important affair? There is one way and one method only, I think: to put the facts out in the open. The matter is so serious that it does not require any eloquence of mine—or of anyone else, since I have none—to arouse your feelings of indignation.

[160] The man I am talking about, Gavius of Consa, was one of the Roman citizens whom Verres had cast into prison, and he had somehow managed to escape undetected from the quarries and make his way to Messana. At Messana, he was within sight of Italy, and could see the walls of Regium, a city of Roman citizens. He had escaped from his dark confinement and the fear of imminent death, and now, restored by the light of freedom and the fresh air of justice, he felt that he had returned to the land of the living. So he began to talk to people, and to complain that he, a Roman citizen, had been put in prison. He said that he was going straight to Rome, so as to be ready for Verres on his return there. The poor man did not realize that it made not the slightest bit of difference whether he said all this at Messana or in the governor’s residence in front of Verres himself. For as I have already explained to you, Verres had specially chosen Messana to be his partner in crime, a holding area for his thefts, and an accomplice in all his wicked deeds. Gavius, therefore, was immediately brought before the chief magistrate of Messana, and as it happened Verres himself was visiting the city that very day. The case was put before him, that there was a Roman citizen who was complaining that he had been in the quarries at Syracuse; he had just been boarding ship, they said, uttering terrible threats against Verres, but they had hauled him back and kept him under guard, so that Verres could decide himself what he wanted to do with him.

[161] Verres thanked the men, and commended their diligence and loyalty towards himself. Then he strode into the forum, fired up with wickedness and rage. His eyes were ablaze, and cruelty shone out all over his face. Everyone was waiting to see what he would do, and how far he would go. Then, without warning, he ordered Gavius to be dragged out, stripped, and bound in the centre of the forum, and for the rods to be unleashed. Poor Gavius shouted out that he was a Roman citizen, and a citizen of Consa, and that he had served in the Roman army with the worthy Roman equestrian Lucius Raecius,
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a businessman at Panhormus who could confirm to Verres everything that he was saying. But Verres replied that he had found out he was actually a spy sent to Sicily by the leaders of the
runaway slaves—although there was no informer who alleged this, nor any scrap of evidence to suggest this, nor the slightest suspicion in anyone’s mind that this was the case. Then Verres gave the order for Gavius to be brutally flogged by several lictors at once.