Imperium (12 page)

That night, after dinner, Cicero received a messenger from Rome. He read the letter, then immediately excused himself and took Lucius, young Frugi, and me aside. The dispatch was from his brother Quintus, and it contained grave news. Hortensius was up to his old tricks again. The extortion court had unexpectedly given permission for a prosecution to be brought against the former governor of Achaia. The prosecutor, Dasianus, a known associate of Verres, had traveled to Greece and back to present his evidence two days before the deadline set for Cicero’s return. Quintus urged his brother to return to Rome as quickly as possible to retrieve the situation.

“It is a trap,” said Lucius, “to make you panic, and cut short your expedition here.”

“Probably so,” agreed Cicero. “But I cannot afford to take the risk. If this other prosecution slips into the court’s schedule before ours, and if Hortensius spins it out as he likes to do, our case could be pushed back until after the elections. By then Hortensius and Metellus will be consuls-elect. That youngest Metellus brother will no doubt be a praetor-elect, and this third will still be governor here. How will that be for having the odds stacked against us?”

“So what are we going to do?”

“We have wasted too much time pursuing the small fry in this investigation,” said Cicero. “We need to take the war into the enemy’s camp and loosen some tongues among those who really know what has been going on—the Romans themselves.”

“I agree,” said Lucius. “The question is: how?”

Cicero glanced around and lowered his voice before replying. “We shall carry out a raid,” he announced. “A raid on the offices of the revenue collectors.”

Even Lucius looked slightly green at that. Short of marching up to the governor’s palace and attempting to arrest Metellus, this was the most provocative gesture Cicero could make. The revenue collectors were a syndicate of well-connected men, of equestrian rank, operating under statutory protection, whose investors would certainly include some of the wealthiest senators in Rome. Cicero himself, as a specialist in commercial law, had built up a network of supporters among exactly this class of businessman. He knew it was a risky strategy, but he was not to be dissuaded, for it was here, he was sure, that the dark heart of Verres’s murderous corruption would be found. He sent the messenger back to Rome that same night with a letter for Quintus, announcing that he had only one more thing left to do, and that he would depart the island within a few days.

Cicero now had to make his preparations with great speed and secrecy. He deliberately timed his raid to take place two days hence, at the least-expected hour—just before dawn on a major public holiday, Terminalia. The fact that this was a day sacred to Terminus, the ancient god of boundaries and good neighbors, only made it more symbolically attractive. Flavius, our host, agreed to come with us, to point out the location of the offices. In the interim, I went down to the harbor in Syracuse and found the trusty skipper I had used years before, when Cicero made his ill-judged return to Italy; hired a ship and crew; and told him to be ready to sail before the end of the week. The evidence we had already collected was packed in trunks and stowed aboard, and the ship was placed under guard.

None of us got much sleep on the night of the raid. In the darkness before dawn we positioned our hired oxcarts at either end of the street to block it, and when Cicero gave the signal we all jumped out carrying our torches. The senator hammered on the door, stood aside without waiting for a reply, and a couple of our burliest attendants took their axes to it. The instant it yielded, we poured into the passage, knocking aside the elderly night watchman, and secured the company’s records. We quickly formed a human chain—Cicero, too—and passed the boxes of wax tablets and papyrus rolls from hand to hand, out into the street and onto our carts.

I learned one valuable lesson that day: if you seek popularity, there is no surer way of achieving it than by raiding a syndicate of tax collectors. As the sun rose and news of our activity spread, an enthusiastic honor guard of Syracusans formed themselves around us, more than large enough to deter the director of the company, Carpinatius, when he arrived to reoccupy the building with a detachment of legionnaires lent to him for the purpose by Lucius Metellus. He and Cicero fell into a furious argument in the middle of the road, Carpinatius insisting that provincial tax records were protected by law from seizure, Cicero retorting that his warrant from the extortion court overrode such technicalities. Cicero conceded afterwards that Carpinatius was right, “but,” he added, “he who controls the street controls the law”—and on this occasion, at least, that man was Cicero.

In all, we must have transported more than four cartloads of records back to the house of Flavius. We locked the gates, posted sentries, and then began the wearying business of sorting through them. Even now, remembering the size of the task that confronted us, I find myself starting to break into a sweat of apprehension. These records, which went back years, not only covered all the state land on Sicily, but also itemized every farmer’s number and quality of grazing animals, and every crop he had ever sown, its size and yield. Here were details of loans issued and taxes paid and correspondence entered into. And it quickly became clear that other hands had already been through this mass of material and removed every trace of Verres’s name. A furious message arrived from the governor’s palace, demanding that Cicero appear before Metellus when the courts reopened the following day, to answer a writ from Carpinatius that he return the documents. Meanwhile, a crowd had gathered outside and was chanting Cicero’s name. At that moment Terentia’s prediction that she and her husband would be ostracized by Rome and end their days as consul and first lady of Thermae seemed more prescient. Only Cicero retained his cool. He had represented enough shady revenue collectors to know most of their tricks. Once it became apparent that the files specifically relating to Verres had been excised, he dug out an old list of all the company’s managers and hunted through it until he came to the name of the firm’s financial director during the period of Verres’s governorship.

“I shall tell you one thing, Tiro,” he said. “I have never come across a financial director yet who did not keep an extra set of records for himself when he handed over to his successor, just to be on the safe side.”

And with that we set off on our second raid of the morning.

Our quarry was a man named Vibius, who was at that moment celebrating Terminalia with his neighbors. They had set up an altar in the garden and there was some corn upon it, also some honeycombs and wine, and Vibius had just sacrificed a suckling pig. (“Very pious, these crooked accountants,” observed Cicero.) When he saw the senator bearing down upon him, he looked a little like a suckling pig himself, but once he had read the warrant, with Glabrio’s praetorian seal attached to it, he reluctantly decided there was nothing he could do except cooperate. Excusing himself from his bemused guests, he led us inside to his tablinum and opened up his strongbox. Among the title deeds, account books, and jewelry, there was a little packet of letters marked “Verres,” and his face, as Cicero broke it open, was one of utter terror. I guess he must have been told to destroy it and had either forgotten or had thought to make some profit out of it.

At first sight, it was nothing much—merely some correspondence from a tax inspector, Lucius Canuleius, who was responsible for collecting export duty on all goods passing through Syracuse harbor. The letters concerned one particular shipment of goods which had left Syracuse two years before, and upon which Verres had failed to pay any tax. The details were attached: four hundred casks of honey, fifty dining room couches, two hundred chandeliers, and ninety bales of Maltese cloth. Another prosecutor might not have spotted the significance, but Cicero saw it at once.

“Take a look at that,” he said, handing it to me. “These are not goods seized from a number of unfortunate individuals.
Four hundred
casks of honey?
Ninety
bales of foreign cloth?” He turned his furious gaze on the hapless Vibius. “This is a
cargo,
isn’t it? Your Governor Verres must have stolen
a ship
.”

Poor Vibius never stood a chance. Glancing nervously over his shoulder at his bewildered guests, who were staring open-mouthed in our direction, he confirmed that this was indeed a ship’s cargo, and that Canuleius had been instructed never again to attempt to levy tax on any of the governor’s exports.

“How many more such shipments did Verres make?” demanded Cicero.

“I am not sure.”

“Guess then.”

“Ten,” said Vibius fearfully. “Perhaps twenty.”

“And no duty was ever paid? No records kept?”

“No.”

“And where did Verres acquire all these cargoes?” demanded Cicero.

Vibius was almost swooning with terror. “Senator. Please—”

“I shall have you arrested,” said Cicero. “I shall have you transported to Rome in chains. I shall break you on the witness stand before a thousand spectators in the Forum Romanum and feed what’s left of you to the dogs of the Capitoline Triad.”

“From ships, senator,” said Vibius, in a little mouse voice. “They came from ships.”

“What ships? Ships from where?”

“From everywhere, senator. Asia. Syria. Tyre. Alexandria.”

“So what happened to these ships? Did Verres have them impounded?”

“Yes, senator.”

“On what grounds?”

“Spying.”

“Ah, spying! Of course! Did ever a man,” said Cicero to me, “root out so many spies as our vigilant Governor Verres? So tell us,” he said, turning back to Vibius, “what became of the crews of these spy ships?”

“They were taken to the Stone Quarries, senator.”

“And what happened to them then?”

He made no reply.

THE STONE QUARRIES was the most fearsome prison in Sicily, probably the most fearsome in the world—at any rate, I never heard of worse. It was six hundred feet long and two hundred wide, gouged deep into the solid rock of that fortified plateau known as Epipolae, which overlooks Syracuse from the north. Here, in this hellish pit, from which no scream could carry, exposed without protection to the burning heat of summer and the cold downpours of winter, tormented by the cruelty of their guards and the debased appetites of their fellow prisoners alike, the victims of Verres suffered and died.

Cicero, with his notorious aversion to military life, was often charged with cowardice by his enemies, and certainly he was prone to nerves and squeamishness. But I can vouch that he was brave enough that day. He went back to our headquarters and collected Lucius, leaving young Frugi behind to continue his search of the tax records. Then, armed only with our walking sticks and the warrant issued by Glabrio, and followed by the now usual crowd of Syracusans, we climbed the steep path to Epipolae, where the news of Cicero’s approach and the nature of his mission had preceded him. After the senator issued a withering harangue to the captain of the guard, threatening all manner of dire repercussions if his demands were not met, we were allowed to pass through the perimeter wall and onto the plateau. Once inside, refusing to heed warnings that it was too dangerous, Cicero insisted on being allowed to inspect the quarries himself.

This vast dungeon, the work of Dionysius the Tyrant, was already more than three centuries old. An ancient metal door was unlocked and we proceeded into the mouth of a tunnel, guided by prison guards who carried burning torches. The glistening walls cankerous with lime and fungi, the scuttling of the rats in the shadows, the stench of death and waste, the cries and groans of abandoned souls—truly, this was a descent into Hades. Eventually we came to another massive door, and when this was unlocked and unbolted we stepped onto the floor of the prison. What a spectacle greeted our eyes! It was as if some giant had filled a sack with hundreds of manacled men and had then tipped them out into a hole. The light was weak, almost subaquatic, and everywhere, as far as the eye could see, there were prisoners. Some shuffled about, a few huddled in groups, but most lay apart from their fellows, mere yellowing sacks of bones. The day’s dead had not yet been cleared, and it was hard to distinguish the living skeletons from the dead.

We picked our way among the corpses—those that had already died, and those whose end had yet to come: there was no discernible difference—and occasionally Cicero stopped and asked a man his name, bending to catch the whispered reply. We found no Romans, only Sicilians. “Is any man here a Roman citizen?” he demanded loudly. “Have any of you been taken from ships?” There was silence. He turned and called for the captain of the watch and demanded to see the prison records. Like Vibius, the wretch struggled between fear of Verres and fear of the special prosecutor, but eventually he succumbed to Cicero’s pressure.

Built into the rock walls of the quarry were separate special cells and galleries, where torture and execution were carried out, and where the guards ate and slept. (The favored method of execution, we discovered afterwards, was the garrote.) Here, too, was housed the administration of the prison, such as it was. Boxes of damp and musty rolls were fetched out for us, containing long lists of prisoners’ names, with the dates of their arrivals and departures. Some men were recorded as having been released, but against most was scratched the Sicilian word
edikaiothesan
—meaning “the death penalty was inflicted upon them.”

“I want a copy of every entry for the three years when Verres was governor,” Cicero said to me. “And you,” he said to the prison captain, “when it is done, will sign a statement to say that we have made a true likeness.”

While I and the other two secretaries set to work, Cicero and Lucius searched through the records for Roman names. Although the majority of those held in the quarry during Verres’s time were obviously Sicilian, there was also a considerable proportion of races from all across the Mediterranean—Spaniards, Egyptians, Syrians, Cilicians, Cretans, Dalmatians. When Cicero asked why they had been imprisoned, he was told they were pirates—pirates and spies. All were recorded as having been put to death, among them the infamous pirate captain Heracleo. The Romans, on the other hand, were officially described as “released”—including the two men from Spain, Publius Gavius and Lucius Herennius, whose executions had been described to us.