He had actually no such slave in his family at all. That Verres there, that ancient betrayer of his consul, that transferrer of the quaestorship,[7] that embezzler of the public money, has taken upon himself so much authority in the republic, that he would have inflicted a bitter and cruel death on all those men whom the senate, and the Roman people, and the magistrates allowed to remain in the forum, in the exercise of their rights as voters, in the city and in the republic, if fortune had brought them to any part of Sicily. But the discipline of this noble commander-in-chief was so strict in his own house, that though the event was so important, the news so serious, still no one could be admitted; no one dared either to wake him if asleep, or to address him if awake. We are using cookies to give you the best experience on our website. who lately stated in his evidence that it was not some stranger, no one knows who, nor any foreigner, but a Roman citizen who was well known to the whole body of inhabitants, who had been born at Syracuse, who had been publicly executed by you. For know that there is no town in all Sicily of those in which the praetors are accustomed to stay and hold their court, in which there was not some woman selected for him out of some respectable family, to gratify his lust. No one was at Lilybaeum who did not see it. In the name of the immortal gods, O judges, with what feelings are you sitting there? Will you make anyone believe that, while the case of both the states was exactly the same, the law that you administered, and the condition in which you left each, was so different, without money being the cause of the difference? See what the people of Tyndaris will willingly state. He comes to Lilybaeum. I feel sure now that I have discharged my duty to the satisfaction of all those who are most unfavorable to me. The necks of Roman citizens were broken in a most infamous manner in the prison; so that very expression and form of entreaty, "I am a Roman citizen," which has often brought to many, in the most distant countries, succour and assistance, even among the barbarians, only brought to these men a more bitter death and a more immediate execution. For to all my attacks the appellation of a gallant general is opposed, as a wall of defence. for when it existed in Sicily, at exactly the same distance from Italy, no part of it reached Italy. Will it be possible for me to dissemble, when the republic has received so severe a wound, that, though I pleaded the cause, our provinces will appear to have been pillaged, our allies oppressed, the immortal gods plundered, Roman citizens tortured and murdered with impunity? And now, can I suppose that anyone doubts that you would never have allowed (especially as you made sure, as you say, that a prosecution would be instituted against you) that pirate to escape execution, and to live to increase your danger which was ever before your eyes? What happened to make that man be kept so carefully out of sight, that no one was ever able to get a glimpse of him, even by accident? to detain him in prison, confined in the custody of your dear friends the Mamertines, till Pretius came from Panormus? Lastly, did you never think that this would be discreditable to you? If any king, if any city among foreign nations, if any nation had done anything of this sort to a Roman citizen, should we not avenge that act by a public resolution? So may your good opinion and that of the Roman people approve of my intentions, and sanction my hopes for the rest of my life, as I have received those offices with which the Roman people has as yet entrusted me with the feeling that I was bound to a conscientious discharge of every possible duty. I will omit all these statements; though, were I to choose to follow them up, I could easily show by your cruelty towards others, that every channel of mercy from the judges to yourself has been long since blocked up. What has the proximity of the countries to do with either side of the argument in discussing this topic? Why was that pirate so concealed as if it were impiety to behold him? He will dilate upon the dangers of the war, the critical time of the republic, the scarcity of able generals; and that he will entreat of you, he will even claim as a right belonging to himself, that you do not suffer so great a general to be taken from the Roman people through the evidence of the Sicilians; that you do not allow his glory as a general to be overclouded by accusations of avarice. The camp of that gambler of Placentia shall be brought up again, where, though he was assiduous in his attendance, he still lost his pay. Oh! And accordingly, O judges, that cross, for the first time since the foundation of Messana, was erected in that place. But what shall be said if he named Lucius Pretius, a Roman knight, who was at that time living in Sicily as a trader, as a man who would vouch for him? But the women were all wives of citizens, of noble birth, except one, the daughter of an actor named Isidorus, whom he, out of love, had seduced away from a Rhodian flute-player. What then? I will not act in so bitter a spirit. For you, by your lust and wickedness, have removed him entirely from his country, in which he flourished as a leading man, illustrious for his many virtues and distinguished services. You must also deprive yourself of the argument, that you are now accused and held up to odium by me, for having punished and executed men according to the custom of our ancestors. It was not Gavius, it was not one individual, I know not whom,—it was not one Roman citizen.—it was the common cause of freedom and citizenship that you exposed to that torture and nailed on that cross. Cleomenes thanks him; approves of his intention; and says that that is what must be done. So the shortness of the day was consumed in banquets, the length of the night in adulteries and debaucheries. Then as each was last in flight, he was first in danger, for the pirates came upon the last ships first, and so the Haluntian vessel is taken first, which was commanded by an Haluntian of noble birth, Philarchus by name, whom the Locrians afterwards ransomed at the public expense from those pirates, and from whom, on his oath, you at the former pleading learned the whole of the circumstances and their cause. Many of his losses in his campaigns shall be recounted, which were made up for and retrieved by the most infamous expedients. All those days no one could find you at your own house, no one could see you in the forum; you entertained the mothers of families of our allies and friends at those banquets; among women of that sort you placed your youthful son, my grandson, in order that his father's life might furnish examples of iniquity to a time of life which is particularly unsteady and open to temptation; you, while praetor in your province, were seen in a tunic and purple cloak; you, to gratify your passion and lust, took away the command of the fleet from a lieutenant of the Roman people, and gave it to a Syracusan; your soldiers in the province of Sicily were in want of provisions and of grain; owing to your luxury and avarice, a fleet belonging to the Roman people was taken and burnt by pirates; in your praetorship, for the first time since Syracuse was a city, did pirates sail about in that harbor, which no enemy had ever entered; moreover, you did not seek to cover these numerous and terrible disgraces of yours by any concealment on your part, nor did you seek to make men forget them by keeping silence respecting them, but you even without any cause tore the captains of the ships from the embrace of their parents, who were your own friends and connections, and hurried them to death and torture; nor, in witnessing the grief and tears of those parents, did any recollection of my name soften your heart; the blood of innocent men was not only a pleasure but also a profit to you.". Shall that man, of such a city as that, a most noble youth, be left to be a witness? of such audacity? ("Agamemnon", "Hom. It will be at a great risk to yourself that any error is committed in this trial; at a greater risk than you think. 13And whenever these things do take place, their effect has been to cause popular or high-born men to be relieved from punishment or exile; still, not by the very men who have passed the sentences; still, not instantly; still, not if they have been convicted of those crimes which affected the lives and property of all the citizens. He forms at first a plan, foolish indeed, but still merciful. It is a vast work and splendid; the work of the old kings and tyrants. That in the war of the runaway slaves Sicily was delivered by your valour? Not at Panormus even. Look now for all the traces of their departure from that place, which are to be seen. Even the wretched parents of the naval captains are punished; they are prevented from visiting their sons; they are prevented from supplying their own children with food and raiment. I was unwilling, O judges, to press this point so strongly at the former pleading; I was unwilling to do so. Verres attempts to bribe Cicero. On what account? Grain was never bought in Sicily by public order, without the Mamertines being ordered to furnish their just proportion, till that fellow appointed this select and admirable bench of his, in order to get money from them, and to act up to his invariable character. Then they demanded Cleomenes, who had been appointed commander-in-chief by him; and nothing was ever nearer happening than the transference of the precedent of Utica in the case of Hadrian to Syracuse;[4] so that two graves of two most infamous governors would have been contained in two provinces. I will say that I am content with that. Even for this object money was given to the lictor. Lastly, if I seem here to have wished to rise at the expense of that one man, which I have not wished,—if he should be acquitted, (a thing which cannot happen without the wickedness of many men,) I shall be enabled to rise at the expense of many. A naval captain of a most noble city ransoms himself from the danger of being scourged with a bribe—it was a human weakness. But it is my deliberate resolution, if the event should deceive the expectation which I cherish of you, to prosecute not only those who are particularly implicated in the guilt of corrupting the tribunal, but those also who have in any way been accomplices in it. Accordingly, they are brought up, and fastened to the stake. And all that time, while that man, clad in a purple cloak and a tunic reaching to his ankles, was revelling in banquets with women, men were not offended, nor in the least vexed that the magistrate was absent from the forum, that the laws were not administered, that the courts of justice were not held; that all that shore resounded with women's vices, and music and songs. But at that time Verres, though you well know how great his impudence is, still could not, as her husband was at Syracuse, be quite easy in his mind at keeping her with him so many days on the seashore. In the meantime, the Syracusans, acute and humane men, who were capable not only of seeing what was evident, but also of conjecturing what was hidden, kept an account every day of the pirates who were put to death; how many there ought to be they calculated from the size of the vessel itself which had been taken, and from the number of oars. when, if you were going anywhere on account of the state, ships were provided for you at the public expense, both to convey you, and to guard you? He gives security. Could not the tears of a father for the danger of his innocent son move you? This Gavius whom I am speaking of, a citizen of Cosa, when he (among that vast number of Roman citizens who had been treated in the same way) had been thrown by Verres into prison, and somehow or other had escaped secretly out of the stonequarries, and had come to Messana, being now almost within sight of Italy and of the walls of Rhegium, and being revived, after that fear of death and that darkness, by the light, as it were, of liberty and of the fragrance of the laws, began to talk at Messana, and to complain that he, a Roman citizen, had been thrown into prison. Each of them stated how many men they knew had been discharged out of their respective ships. Enough has been done by me, O judges, to satisfy the Sicilians, enough to discharge my duty and obligation to them, enough to acquit me of my promise and of the labor which I have undertaken. But there is a word written in those documents, which that ignorant and profligate man never noticed, and would not have understood if he had. What would you say, if the very day before you were compelled by me to confess that, though you had put Roman citizens to death, the pirate captain was alive and in your house,—if, I say, the very day before, he had escaped from your house, and had been able to collect an army against the Roman people? Was it then so? A spot commanding a view of Italy was picked out by that man, for the express purpose that the wretched man who was dying in agony and torture might see that the rights of liberty and of slavery were only separated by a very narrow strait, and that Italy might behold her son murdered by the most miserable and most painful punishment appropriate to slaves alone. Then he says that this is the reason,—because they had betrayed the fleet to the pirates. but the Mamertines have no entries respecting it in their public accounts. For the blood of all Roman citizens ought to be accounted kindred blood; since the consideration of the common safety, and truth requires it. However, those who were left behind displayed a good deal of courage. For myself, even though I were not to say it myself, who is there who is not aware how far it is necessary for me to proceed? Then Verres says that he has ascertained that he had been sent into Sicily by the leaders of the runaway slaves, in order to act as a spy; a matter as to which there was no witness, no trace, nor even the slightest suspicion in the mind of any one. Therefore, you were not only unwilling to drive Chelidon from your house during your praetorship, but you even transported your whole praetorship to Chelidon's house. However, so be it. Here that gallant general was quartered in the winter months, so securely that it was not easy to see him, I will not say out of the house, but even out of bed. For the accusation I bring against you impeaches you of excessive avarice: the defense that you make for yourself accuses you of a sort of frenzy, of savage ferocity, of unheard-of cruelty, and of almost a new proscription. Get tips and ideas in OUTLINE. However, the commanders were killed in battle, so the Senate's army came under the control of Octavian. And why was it that that triumph was of all triumphs the most acceptable and the most delightful to the Roman people? But afterwards, when he had become hardened by a long course of such infamy,—when he had sated others, not himself,—why need I relate what sort of man he turned out? The remainder of the trial is not now about my good faith, which has been amply proved, nor about that fellow's way of life, which has been fully condemned; but it is the judges, and if I am to tell the truth, it is yourself, who will now be passed sentence on. He said that he was a Roman citizen. 21I will not seek to excite any odium against you, not even out of the circumstances that, while such a man was lying in prison, in darkness, in dirt and filth, all permission to visit him was refused by your tyrannical prohibition to his aged father, and to his youthful son. What had become of the city of Segesta? In truth, as no two things are so closely united as the traders are with the Sicilians, by habit, by interest, by reason, and by community of sentiment; and as the Sicilians have all their affairs in such a state that it is most desirable for them to be at peace; and as they are so attached to the sway of the Roman people that they would be very sorry that its power should be diminished or altered; and as ever since the servile war all such dangers as these have been provided for, both by the regulations of the praetors, and by the discipline of the masters; there is no conceivable domestic evil which can arise out of the province itself.
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