Ancient Rome and Modern America; A Comparative Study of Morals and Manners

by Guglielmo Ferrero

Cicero was successful in this first skirmish. He obtained recognition from the court as the prosecutor of Verres, and was granted one hundred and ten days in which to proceed to Sicily to collect the proofs of his accusation. He started at once.

At Rome, the struggle between the party with the purse and the Democratic opposition, encouraged by the support of the two all-powerful Consuls, waxed furious. Pompey and Crassus induced the Senate to restore to the Tribunes their ancient powers. They re-established the censorship and by the instrumentality of the two newly elected Censors, they ejected from the Senate many of the more contemptible of Sulla’s partisans. Marcus Aurelius Cotta proposed a reform of the courts which would have removed the latter almost entirely from the influence of the dominant party.

Naturally, these discussions, these laws, and these proposals served only to increase the general excitement; and of this excitement Verres took advantage to identify still further his own cause with that of the party in power. He placed at the disposal of the party the wealth he had well or badly earned in his province as well as his influence and his personality. The party on their side chose as candidates for the consulship Q. Hortensius, his defending counsel, and Quintus Metellus, who was a great friend of Verres; for the prætorship, Marcus Metellus, a brother of Quintus and no less than Quintus a friend of Verres. They opposed with all their force the law proposed by Cotta, which would have transformed the courts in a manner most unfavourable to Verres’s interests. The Democratic party in their turn took the Sicilians’ cause under their protection, to the extent of choosing Cicero, their illustrious advocate, as candidate for the ædileship.

Thus the elections of the year 70 promised to be bound up in the trial of Verres. They seemed likely to be the means by which the two parties would endeavour to influence public opinion in favour of the prosecution or of the defence. Unfortunately, when Cicero, after an absence of about two months returned to Rome from Sicily, with abundant matter in the shape of documents and proofs, he found the situation of the popular party, and consequently his action against Verres—for its fate was bound up in that of the party—gravely compromised by a rupture which had arisen between the two Consuls. There was no love lost between Pompey and Crassus. Each was jealous of the other. In putting themselves at the head of the Democratic party, they had been guided by ambition and political calculations. But they were both too rich, and had too many ties with, and friendships among, the dominant party—from which both of them came—to be able to infuse much zeal and sincerity into their services to the opposition. As a result, each had ended by attacking the other; and these attacks, after some months of activity, had paralysed the Democratic party, and restored boldness and confidence to the Conservative party, which was now resolved to wreck the law of judicial reform and to obtain Verres’s acquittal, the two triumphs at which it aimed.

When Cicero returned, the elections were imminent, and because of their imminence everyone was in a state of preoccupation and uncertainty. It would not have been prudent for either party to incur the risk of the trial before the elections. So the trial was postponed without any difficulty or opposition. It was the month of June; and, in the following July, the elections would, as usual, take place. Those for the consulship and prætorship were a great triumph for Verres. Quintus Hortensius and Quintus Metellus were elected Consuls; Marcus Metellus was elected Prætor. Verres had conquered all along the line! The evening of the day on which the Consuls were elected, Verres was publicly congratulated on the result near the Arch of Fabius by several members of the aristocracy; and one of them, Caius Curion, told him in so many words that “the comitia had acquitted him.” Cicero was naturally much upset; but he did not lose heart. He discontinued for some time working up his case, and devoted himself entirely to his election to the ædileship. The Democratic party had realised that, after their want of success in the elections to the consulship and the prætorship, a further failure in the shape of Cicero’s non-election would seriously compromise their chances in the prosecution of Verres. In fact, Verres and his friends were working like demons against Cicero, using against him all the resources of money, intrigue, and calumny. Those were days of anxiety and turmoil for Cicero, the days of the struggle, but, thanks to the energetic support on this occasion of Pompey, Cicero was elected.

The elections over, attention was again directed to the trial, the opening of which was fixed for the 5th of August; and the two parties began to sharpen their weapons for the decisive and supreme issue. There were two phases to a Roman trial; in the initial phase, the prosecutor had the first word, opening his case, and the defendant replied; the witnesses also were heard. Then followed a suspension of the proceedings, after which the prosecutor once more spoke and the defendant once more replied. Then the jury—for the Court was composed of a jury drawn by lot from the body of Senators and presided over by the Prætor—gave its verdict. Those in favour of acquittal wrote an A (absolvo) on the waxed tablet, those in favour of conviction wrote a C (condemno). Cicero’s intention was to abbreviate his opening statement as much as possible; then to bring forward a large number of witnesses whom he had brought from Sicily and collected in Rome, so as to make a complete history of the whole of Verres’s political life and administration. The charge against Verres was that he had extorted forty million sestertii from the provincials. But it would not satisfy Cicero to prove only this point. He wanted to show that Verres had been guilty of the countless rascalities which the popular voice attributed to him, beginning from the time of his first occupation of the office of quæstor; in short, to reconstruct with the help of witnesses and documentary evidence the whole of his public and private life. To strengthen the impression made by his case, he intended to bring the witnesses forward in groups corresponding to the different charges, and to introduce one group after the other, prefacing the introduction of each group with a short explanatory speech, in such a way as to focus the attention of the public each time on a definite and precise episode in Verres’s career.

This method of procedure on the part of the prosecution may seem to us barbarous and inhuman. We should think it atrocious if, even against the greatest of scoundrels, the prosecution instituted an inquiry into the whole of his life in order to punish him for, and to convict him of, a single offence. Against such methods, we should not expect anyone, however innocent, to be able to defend himself. And yet, so greatly do feelings and ideas change in the world—Verres and most of his friends had hopes of finding their best line of defence in this relentless prosecution. An all-embracing accusation, such as Cicero intended to make, might, it is true, annihilate a man; but it required much time, days and days of discussion. Now, time was the ally on which Verres and his friends counted most confidently. The trial began on the 5th of August; the 16th to the 31st of August were the dates fixed for the celebration of the games which Pompey had promised for years past in memory of his victories over Sertorius. During this interval, the trial would have to be suspended. Further suspensions would be necessary from the 4th to the 19th of September, because of the Roman games; from the 26th of October to the 4th of November because of the games of Victory; from the 4th to the 17th of November because of the ludi plebei. Thanks to this abundance of games, then, there was a prospect, especially when Cicero’s wish to amplify the indictment was taken into account, that the discussion would be unduly prolonged. Other pretexts for postponement would surely not be wanting. In the meantime public interest would flag; and, if one could look forward to the new year, the presidency of the jury would pass to the new Prætor, Marcus Metellus, who was an intimate friend of Verres. With his connivance, it would be easy to find a way of bringing the prosecution to an end with a convenient acquittal. In fact, Hortensius advised Verres to let Cicero call as many witnesses as he wished, and to let them talk freely, without contradicting them and without being drawn into a discussion with them, but listening to them in austere and contemptuous silence.

The doubtful and decisive point, then, of this great struggle was this: whether greater success would attend Cicero in his efforts to move the public with his tenacious and insistent accusations, or Verres and his friends in their efforts to tire out that public with their passive resistance. At last, on August 5th, the trial, the preparations for which had occupied so many months, began. The public expectations and curiosity were immense. The struggles and intrigues of the parties had by now converted the trial into a political event. The Democratic opposition wanted Verres to be convicted, so as to inflict a humiliation on the dominant party and to be able to accuse it of countenancing the pillage of the provinces. The Conservative party wished for Verres’s acquittal so as to be able to assert that these accusations of misgovernment, like so many others that had been launched on previous occasions against other governors, were calumnies concocted by the Democratic party, and noxious calumnies to boot, inasmuch as they jeopardised the prestige of the Empire amongst its subjects. Rome was, during these weeks, full of Italians from the North and South, who had come for the elections, the games, and the new census; hence the trial gained in general interest and importance. During the days of waiting for the Pompeian games to begin, this great trial, in which Hortensius and Cicero, the Conservative aristocracy and the Popular party, were to be pitted against each other, promised to be an interesting way of passing the time for all those strangers who had nothing to do. In ancient Rome, as in all parts of the world nowadays, trials were a gratuitous spectacle much to the taste of the public. Thus, on that morning of the 5th of August, an immense crowd thronged the Forum, round the benches on which the judges, the prosecution, the defendant, and his supporters were to take their seats.

Verres showed a proud and resolute bearing, and appeared surrounded by a crowd of influential friends. Cicero had the first word, and made a short speech, in which he did not refer to any of the facts to which his witnesses were expected to testify, saying that he would let them speak for themselves. He preferred to deal generically with the political and moral importance of the trial. He said that the provinces, nay, the whole Empire was anxiously following the proceeding which would tell whether there were judges and any hope of justice in Rome. He concluded with a dexterous reference to the suspicions of corruption which were flying about, and to the boasts that Verres was supposed to have made of his ability, with the help of his money, to flout with impunity every court of justice. It was for Hortensius to reply to Cicero’s speech; but he complained that it had been so vague and generic that it contained no single point which he could seize and demolish.

Then began a long procession of witnesses, and a fierce and venomous lot they were, with terrible tales for the ears of the judges and the public! In order to secure Verres’s conviction and sentence to a fine of one hundred million sestertii, under the lex de pecuniis repetundis, Cicero produced witnesses who accused him of every sort of crime; of having committed acts of sacrilege, of having gone shares with the pirates whom he ought to have harried and destroyed, of having been guilty of numberless acts of peculation and malversation, and of having condemned Roman citizens to death! To prove these charges, Cicero had unearthed hundreds of witnesses from every class of society, of both sexes, and of all ages, who, carefully coached and prepared beforehand, entered the witness-box to add their quota to the fierce attacks on Verres. It is difficult to judge how much of these impassioned and violent stories was true, and how much pure invention, as we have no documentary evidence relating to this trial other than the speeches for the prosecution. Besides, Verres, as we have said, did not avail himself of the right of cross-examination which the law allowed him. He allowed the avalanche of charges to slide unchecked down the slope, and to hurl itself into the valley, hoping that it would stop of its own accord. However, it is not improbable that the evidence contained no small number of exaggerations. A Sicilian friend of mine, an eminent politician and a man with a profound knowledge of his native island, is constantly reminding me that, even at the present day, the Sicilians throw so much passion into their political struggles that great circumspection is required in sifting the accusations hurled by one side against the other, when rivalry and party animosity come into play. “Only imagine,” he says, “how it must have been in ancient times.” Besides, everyone who reads Cicero’s speeches cannot help feeling, from time to time, that the list of villainies he enumerates is really too long even for the greatest villain that ever lived.