Imperium (17 page)

“Today the eyes of the world are upon us, waiting to see how far the conduct of each man among us will be marked by obedience to his conscience and observance of the law. Even as you will pass your verdict upon the prisoner, so the people of Rome will pass their verdict upon yourselves. The case of Verres will determine whether, in a court composed of senators, the condemnation of a very guilty and very rich man can possibly occur. Because all the world knows that Verres is distinguished by nothing except his monstrous offenses and his immense wealth. Therefore if he is acquitted it will be impossible to imagine any explanation except the most shameful. So I advise you, gentlemen, for your own sakes, to see that this does not occur.” And with that he turned his back on them. “I call my first witness—Sthenius of Thermae.”

I doubt very strongly whether any of the aristocrats on that jury—Catulus, Isauricus, Metellus, Catilina, Lucretius, Aemilius, and the rest—had ever been addressed with such insolence before, especially by a new man without a single ancestral mask to show on his atrium wall. How they must have loathed being made to sit there and take it, especially given the deliriums of ecstasy with which Cicero was received by the vast crowd in the Forum when he sat down. As for Hortensius, it was possible almost to feel sorry for him. His entire career had been founded on his ability to memorize immense orations and deliver them with the aplomb of an actor. Now he was effectively struck mute; worse, he was faced with the prospect of having to deliver four dozen mini-speeches in reply to each of Cicero’s witnesses over the next ten days. He had not done sufficient research even remotely to attempt this, as became cruelly evident when Sthenius took the witness stand. Cicero had called him first as a mark of respect for the originator of this whole fantastic undertaking, and the Sicilian did not let him down. He had waited a long time for his day in court, and he gave a heart-wringing account of the way Verres had abused his hospitality, stolen his property, trumped up charges against him, fined him, tried to have him flogged, sentenced him to death in his absence, and then forged the records of the Syracusan court—records which Cicero produced in evidence and passed around the jury.

But when Glabrio called upon Hortensius to cross-examine the witness, the Dancing Master, not unnaturally, showed some reluctance to take the floor. The one golden rule of cross-examination is never, under any circumstances, to ask a question to which you do not know the answer, and Hortensius simply had no idea what Sthenius might say next. He shuffled a few documents, held a whispered consultation with Verres, then approached the witness stand. What could he do? After a few petulant questions, the implication of which was that the Sicilian was fundamentally hostile to Roman rule, he asked him why, of all the lawyers available, he had chosen to go straight to Cicero—a man known to be an agitator of the lower classes. Surely his whole motivation from the start was merely to stir up trouble?

“But I did not go straight to Cicero,” replied Sthenius in his ingenuous way. “The first advocate I went to was you.”

Even some of the jury laughed at that.

Hortensius swallowed and attempted to join in the merriment. “Did you really? I cannot say that I remember you.”

“Well, you wouldn’t, would you? You are a busy man. But I remember you, senator. You said you were representing Verres. You said you did not care how much of my property he had stolen—no court would ever believe the word of a Sicilian over a Roman.”

Hortensius had to wait for the storm of catcalls to die down. “I have no further questions for this witness,” he said in a grim voice, and with that the court was adjourned until the following day.

IT HAD BEEN MY INTENTION to describe in detail the trial of Gaius Verres, but now I come to set it down, I see there is no point. After Cicero’s tactical masterstroke on that first day, Verres and his advocates resembled nothing so much as the victims of a siege: holed up in their little fortress, surrounded by their enemies, battered day after day by a rain of missiles, and their crumbling walls undermined by tunnels. They had no means of fighting back. Their only hope was somehow to withstand the onslaught for the nine days remaining, and then try to regroup during the lull enforced by Pompey’s games. Cicero’s objective was equally clear: to obliterate Verres’s defenses so completely that by the time he had finished laying out his case, not even the most corrupt senatorial jury in Rome would dare to acquit him.

He set about this mission with his usual discipline. The prosecution team would gather before dawn. While Cicero performed his exercises, was shaved and dressed, I would read out the testimony of the witnesses he would be calling that day and run through our schedule of evidence. He would then dictate to me the rough outline of what he intended to say. For an hour or two he would familiarize himself with the day’s brief and thoroughly memorize his remarks, while Quintus, Frugi, and I ensured that all his witnesses and evidence boxes were ready. We would then parade down the hill to the Forum—and parades they were, for the general view around Rome was that Cicero’s performance in the extortion court was the greatest show in town. The crowds were as large on the second and third days as they had been on the first, and the witnesses’ performances were often heartbreaking, as they collapsed in tears recounting their ill treatment. I remember in particular Dio of Halaesa, swindled out of ten thousand sesterces, and two brothers from Agyrium forced to hand over their entire inheritance of four thousand. There would have been more, but Lucius Metellus had actually refused to let a dozen witnesses leave the island to testify, among them the chief priest of Jupiter, Heraclius of Syracuse—an outrage against justice which Cicero neatly turned to his advantage. “Our allies’ rights,” he boomed, “do not even include permission to complain of their sufferings!” Throughout all this, Hortensius, amazing to relate, never said a word. Cicero would finish his examination of a witness, Glabrio would offer the King of the Law Courts his chance to cross-examine, and His Majesty would regally shake his head, or declare grandly, “No questions for this witness.” On the fourth day, Verres pleaded illness and tried to be excused from attending, but Glabrio was having none of it, and told him he would be carried down to the Forum on his bed if necessary.

It was on the following afternoon that Cicero’s cousin Lucius at last returned to Rome, his mission in Sicily accomplished. Cicero was overjoyed to find him waiting at the house when we got back from court, and he embraced him tearfully. Without Lucius’s support in dispatching witnesses and boxes of evidence back to the mainland, Cicero’s case would not have been half as strong. But the seven-month effort had clearly exhausted Lucius, who had not been a strong man to begin with. He was now alarmingly thin and had developed a painful, racking cough. Even so, his commitment to bringing Verres to justice was unwavering—so much so that he had missed the opening of the trial in order to take a detour on his journey back to Rome. He had stayed in Puteoli and tracked down two more witnesses: the Roman knight, Gaius Numitorius, who had witnessed the crucifixion of Gavius in Messana; and a friend of his, a merchant named Marcus Annius, who had been in Syracuse when the Roman banker Herennius had been judicially murdered.

“And where are these gentlemen?” asked Cicero eagerly.

“Here,” replied Lucius. “In the tablinum. But I must warn you, they do not want to testify.”

Cicero hurried through to find two formidable men of middle age—“the perfect witnesses from my point of view,” as Cicero afterwards described them, “prosperous, respectable, sober, and above all—not Sicilian.” As Lucius had predicted, they were reluctant to get involved. They were businessmen, with no desire to make powerful enemies, and did not relish the prospect of taking starring roles in Cicero’s great anti-aristocratic production in the Roman Forum. But he wore them down, for they were not fools, either, and could see that in the ledger of profit and loss, they stood to gain most by aligning themselves with the side that was winning. “Do you remember what Pompey said to Sulla, when the old man tried to deny him a triumph on his twenty-sixth birthday?” asked Cicero. “He told me over dinner the other night: ‘More people worship a rising than a setting sun.’” This potent combination of name-dropping and appeals to patriotism and self-interest at last brought them around, and by the time they went in to dinner with Cicero and his family they had pledged their support.

“I knew if I had them in your company for a few moments,” whispered Lucius, “they would do whatever you wanted.”

I had expected Cicero to put them on the witness stand the very next day, but he was too smart for that. “A show must always end with a climax,” he said. He was ratcheting up the level of outrage with each new piece of evidence, having moved on through judicial corruption, extortion, and straightforward robbery to cruel and unusual punishment. On the eighth day of the trial, he dealt with the testimony of two Sicilian naval captains, Phalacrus of Centuripae and Onasus of Segesta, who described how they and their men had escaped floggings and executions by bribing Verres’s freedman Timarchides (present in court, I am glad to say, to experience his humiliation personally). Worse: the families of those who had not been able to raise sufficient funds to secure the release of their relatives had been told they would still have to pay a bribe to the official executioner, Sextius, or he would deliberately make a mess of the beheadings. “Think of that unbearable burden of pain,” declaimed Cicero, “of the anguish that racked those unhappy parents, thus compelled to purchase for their children by bribery not life but a speedy death!” I could see the senators on the jury shaking their heads at this and muttering to one another, and each time Glabrio invited Hortensius to cross-examine the witnesses, and Hortensius simply responded yet again, “No questions,” they groaned. Their position was becoming intolerable, and that night the first rumors reached us that Verres had already packed up the contents of his house and was preparing to flee into exile.

Such was the state of affairs on the ninth day, when we brought Annius and Numitorius into court. If anything, the crowd in the Forum was bigger than ever, for there were now only two days left until Pompey’s great games. Verres came late and obviously drunk. He stumbled as he climbed the steps of the temple up to the tribunal, and Hortensius had to steady him as the crowd roared with laughter. As he passed Cicero’s place, he flashed him a shattered, red-eyed look of fear and rage—the hunted, cornered look of an animal: the Boar at bay. Cicero got straight down to business and called as his first witness Annius, who described how he had been inspecting a cargo down at the harbor in Syracuse one morning when a friend had come running to tell him that their business associate, Herennius, was in chains in the forum and pleading for his life.

“So what did you do?”

“Naturally, I went at once.”

“And what was the scene?”

“There were perhaps a hundred people crying out that Herennius was a Roman citizen and could not be executed without a proper trial.”

“How did you all know that Herennius was a Roman? Was he not a banker from Spain?”

“Many of us knew him personally. Although he had business in Spain, he had been born to a Roman family in Syracuse and had grown up in the city.”

“And what was Verres’s response to your pleas?”

“He ordered Herennius to be beheaded immediately.”

There was a groan of horror around the court.

“And who dealt the fatal blow?”

“The public executioner, Sextius.”

“And did he make a clean job of it?”

“I am afraid he did not, no.”

“Clearly,” said Cicero, turning to the jury, “he had not paid Verres and his gang of thieves a large enough bribe.”

For most of the trial, Verres had sat slumped in his chair, but on this morning, fired by drink, he jumped up and began shouting that he had never taken any such bribe. Hortensius had to pull him down. Cicero ignored him and went on calmly questioning his witness.

“This is an extraordinary situation, is it not? A hundred of you vouch for the identity of this Roman citizen, yet Verres does not even wait an hour to establish the truth of who he is. How do you account for it?”

“I can account for it easily, senator. Herennius was a passenger on a ship from Spain that was impounded with all its cargo by Verres’s agents. He was sent to the Stone Quarries, along with everyone else on board, then dragged out to be publicly executed as a pirate. What Verres did not realize was that Herennius was not from Spain at all. He was known to the Roman community in Syracuse and would be recognized. But by the time Verres discovered his mistake, Herennius could not be allowed to go free, because he knew too much about what the governor was up to.”

“Forgive me, I do not understand,” said Cicero, playing the innocent. “Why would Verres want to execute an innocent passenger on a cargo ship as a pirate?”

“He needed to show a sufficient number of executions.”

“Why?”

“Because he was being paid bribes to let the real pirates go free.”

Verres was on his feet again shouting that it was a lie, and this time Cicero took a few paces toward him. “A lie, you monster? A lie? Then why in your own prison records does it state that Herennius was released? And why do they further state that the notorious pirate captain Heracleo was executed, when no one on the island ever saw him die? I shall tell you why—because you, the Roman governor, responsible for the safety of the seas, were all the while taking bribes from the very pirates themselves!”

“Cicero, the great lawyer, who thinks himself so clever!” said Verres bitterly, his words slurred by drink. “Who thinks he knows everything! Well, here is something you do not know. I have Heracleo in my private custody, here in my house in Rome, and he can tell you all himself that it is a lie!”

Amazing now, to reflect that a man could blurt out something so foolish, but the facts are there—they are in the record—and amid the pandemonium in court, Cicero could be heard demanding of Glabrio that the famous pirate be fetched from Verres’s house by the lictors and placed in proper official custody, “for the public safety.” Then, while that was being done, he called as his second witness of the day Gaius Numitorius. Privately I thought that Cicero was rushing it too much: that he could have milked the admission about Heracleo for more. But the great advocate had sensed that the moment of the kill had arrived, and for months, ever since we had first landed in Sicily, he had known exactly the blade he wished to use. Numitorius swore an oath to tell the truth and took the stand, and Cicero quickly led him through his testimony to establish the essential facts about Publius Gavius: that he was a merchant traveling on a ship from Spain; that his ship had been impounded and the passengers all taken to the Stone Quarries, from which Gavius had somehow managed to escape; that he had made his way to Messana to take a ship to the mainland, had been apprehended as he went aboard, and had been handed over to Verres when he visited the town. The silence of the listening multitudes was intense.