In Verrem
"In Verrem" ("Against Verres") is a series of speeches made by
Background to the case
During the civil war between the government and the outlaw Sulla (83–82 BC), Verres had been a junior officer in a Marian legion under Gaius Papirius Carbo. He saw the tides of the war shifting to Sulla, and so, Cicero alleged, went over to Sulla's lines bearing his legion's paychest.[1]
Afterwards, he was protected to a degree by Sulla, and allowed to indulge a skill for gubernatorial extortion in
At the same time, Marcus Tullius Cicero was an up-and-coming political figure. After defending
First speech
The first speech was the only one to be delivered in front of the praetor urbanus Manius Acilius Glabrio. In it, Cicero took advantage of the almost unconditional freedom to speak in court to demolish Verres' case.
Cicero touched very little on Verres' extortion crimes in Sicily in the first speech. Instead, he took a two-pronged approach, by both inflating the vanity of the all-
Verres had secured the services of the finest orator of his day,
The point of the attempted derailment of the case hinged on Roman custom. At the time the case was being argued, the year was coming to a close and soon a number of public festivals (including one in honor of
Hortensius and Verres both knew, Cicero argued, that Marcus Metellus, a friend and ally of Verres, would be in charge of the extortion court in the new year, and so saw a benefit to such a gaming of the system. In addition, Hortensius himself, along with Quintus Metellus, Marcus's older brother, had been elected consuls for the same year, and would thus be in prime position to intimidate the witnesses when the case resumed after the expected lull. As such, Verres and his supporters were supremely confident of victory. Indeed, Cicero remarked that, immediately after the election of Hortensius and Metellus, one of his friends had heard the former consul Gaius Scribonius Curio publicly congratulate Verres, declaring that he was now as good as acquitted.
Cicero, too, had a unique strategy in mind for his prosecution. In 81 BC, the
Further, to counteract Hortensius' attempts to draw the trial out, Cicero begged the court's indulgence to allow him to alter the trial's flow from the usual format. In normal trials, both prosecution and defense would make a series of adversarial speeches before witnesses were called. Cicero realized that this would inevitably drag out the proceedings past the new year, and so he requested that he be allowed to call witnesses immediately to buttress his charges, before the speeches were made.[4]
Outline of the main charges in second speech
The first speech had touched more on the sharp practice of Verres and his attorney, Hortensius, in trying to derail or delay the trial. In the second, infinitely more damning speech, Cicero laid out the full charge sheet. The second speech apparently was meant to have been his rebuttal speech had the trial continued, as it alludes to witnesses as already having testified in front of Glabrio's court.
Cicero enumerated a number of charges against Verres during his tenure as governor of Sicily. The main ones that serve as the greatest portion of the text concern a naval scandal that Verres had fomented as a complex means of embezzlement. These were that he subverted Roman security by accepting a bribe from the city of Messana to release them from their duty of providing a ship for the Roman fleet and that he fraudulently discharged men from fleet service, did not mark them down as discharged, and pocketed their active duty pay. Pirates that were captured were sometimes sold under the table by Verres as slaves, rather than being executed, as Cicero argues was the proper punishment. To camouflage the fact that this was going on, Cicero further accuses Verres of administratively shuffling around the pirates to cities that had no knowledge of them and substituting others in their place on the execution block.
Moreover, Cicero alleges that Verres placed a crony of his, Cleomenes by name, as commander of a fleet expedition to destroy a group of pirates in the area (the reason being, Cicero argues, to keep him out of reach as Verres cuckolded him) and that Cleomenes, due to incompetence, allowed the pirates to enter into Syracuse harbor and sack the town. Further, after the abject failure of Cleomenes' expedition, to keep the blame off himself for allowing the fleet to go out undermanned and ill-led, Verres ordered all the ships' captains except for Cleomenes to be executed. More charges were levelled outside of this naval affair. They include:
- A scheme of extortion centered on the Third Servile War, in which Verres allegedly would accuse key slaves of wealthy landowners of being in league with the rebelling slaves on the mainland, arresting them and then soliciting large bribes to void the charges;
- He ordered ships that had valuable cargoes impounded as allegedly belonging to the rebel Syracuse, and were executed without trial as alleged sympathizers or soldiers of Sertorius.
- one prisoner of Verres' scheme, Publius Gavius, a Roman citizen of Compsa, escaped and protested about Verres' treatment of Roman citizens. Verres had the man flogged, and then he had him crucified, both punishments not to be inflicted on a Roman citizen without a trial in Rome (and even then, an execution by crucifixion was never to be performed on a Roman citizen). To add to the humiliation, Verres was alleged to have placed the cross bearing Gavius on a spot where the coastline of mainland Italy (symbolically the border of Verres' power) could be seen by him as he died.
- He ordered his lictors and his chief lictor, Sextus in particular, to beat an elderly man of Panormus, a Roman citizen named Gaius Servilius, to near-death for criticizing Verres' rule. Servilius later died of his injuries.
Outcome of the speeches
Of the planned orators, only Cicero had an opportunity to speak. Cicero detailed Verres' early crimes and Verres' attempts to derail the trial. Soon after the court heard Cicero's speeches, Hortensius advised Verres that it would be hard for him to win at this point, and further advised that the best course of action was for Verres to essentially plead
References
Further reading
- Excerpts from an English translation of the speeches are published in "Introduction: 5 Books of the Second Action Against Verres", in C. D. Yonge, ed., The Orations of M. Tullius Cicero (London: George Bell & Sons, 1903), available online: uah.edu
External links
- Works related to Against Verres at Wikisource