Although we to-day can pass a dispassionate judgment on the events of twenty centuries ago, their contemporaries, embroiled in the turmoil of unbridled passions, were not capable of so great detachment. At this point, a phenomenon occurred which neither Cicero, Hortensius, nor Verres had foreseen. Public opinion, which had been grumbling for a long time at the excesses of the oligarchical government, and which was ready to extend blind credence to such charges as the subtle propaganda of the democratic opposition devised, gave birth to one of those formidable and unexpected movements which no human force can resist. Day by day, as the evidence of the witnesses spread from the Forum through the city, was digested, embroidered, exaggerated from mouth to mouth,—in those days, conversation performed the function of newspapers, with the same defects, imprecision, and exaggeration, as the latter,—an ungovernable wave of indignation against Verres swept over Rome. No one set himself to sift the evidence dispassionately, or by subtle analysis to separate the true from the legendary. The weightier and the more terrible the charges against Verres, the more readily they found credence. Each succeeding day saw an increase in the public indignation and fury, as well as in the crowd that filled the Forum. On the day on which a witness deposed that Verres had condemned to death a Roman citizen who had in vain cried, “Civis Romanus sum,” such a hubbub and commotion arose among the public that the Prætor was obliged to close the sitting in hot haste, for fear of some great calamity if the case proceeded. For five, six, seven, even for ten days, Verres and his defenders faced the storm, hoping that the wind would shift, that, after the first burst of passion was spent, public opinion would veer round, regain self-control, and re-enter a state of calm, conducive to reasoning and discussion. Each morning saw the inexorable figure of Cicero at the head of a new handful of witnesses, who came to re-kindle the public indignation by revelations of new crimes and villainies, real or imaginary.

When, after fourteen days of discussion, the first phase of the case came to an end and there was a suspension of proceedings pending the second phase, Verres, his defenders, and his friends, were obliged to hold a council of war. The situation was desperate. The hope of tiring out public opinion with the length of the proceedings had proved a vain illusion. There was no longer room for hope that the court might acquit Verres. Even if every one of the judges had been convinced of the entire and complete innocence of Verres, they would not have dared to acquit him in face of the excited state of public opinion, for fear of being suspected of corruption. Rome, Italy, the Empire, would have declared with one voice that the judges had absolved Verres because they had been bought with the gold which he had extorted in such quantities from the Sicilians. The public clamoured for their victim. Besides, even supposing that the judges had the inconceivable courage to acquit Verres, his political career, after such a scandal, was at an end. What use was it then to persist with the struggle, when the battle was already irretrievably lost? It was best to give in. Verres had better not show himself further at the trial, and had better go into voluntary exile. In that case, he was sure to be fined much less heavily, and to save his patrimony from the wreck of his political fortunes.

Verres bowed his head to destiny, which had chosen him to be, in the eyes of Italy and the Empire, the victim sacrificed to expiate the misdeeds and the outrages committed by all the Roman governors since the restoration of Sulla. When the trial began again, for the second and decisive phase, he did not put in an appearance. He had already gone into exile. Such was the delight of the judges that, by declaring himself guilty, he had spared them the unpleasant and responsible task of doing so themselves, that they inflicted upon him the lightest of punishments. They condemned him to pay, not one hundred millions, as the Sicilians demanded, but only three millions of sestertii. A fine of three million sestertii was the judicial imprimatur on a trial, in the course of which a member of the Roman aristocracy had been accused by a host of witnesses of the greatest atrocities and outrages, some of which, if true, would have sufficed to bring him to the scaffold.

When we read the violent speeches which Cicero wrote after the trial, and which he would have pronounced, if it had continued into its second phase, in order to sum up and point the moral of the terrible evidence which had been given against Verres; when we compare these speeches and the charges which they formulate, annotate, and tabulate with the lenient and light penalty inflicted, we can, at first blush, only feel surprise. The historian asks himself whether the whole of this trial—which is certainly one of the most famous in the history of the world—was not a sort of comedy played by actors of great skill for the benefit of an ignorant and ingenuous public. Such a judgment would, however, be too severe. Cicero was an honourable and upright man, and defended the cause of his Sicilian clients with sincerity and loyalty. No, this trial was not simply a judicial episode. It was a political drama, and, like all political dramas, was overlaid with phenomena which to a certain extent hide its real nature and essence from the eyes of posterity as it hid these from those of its contemporaries. It must not be forgotten that all the actors in this trial, the accused, the prosecutor, the defending counsel, and the judges, belonged to the same aristocracy. At a certain moment this aristocracy had found itself compelled, by intestinal quarrels and by a complex political situation, to sacrifice, in a trial at law, one of its members in order to satisfy public opinion, Italy, and the Empire; in order to prove that it was not true, as a whole party was busy whispering about Rome, that the Roman governors, provided they belonged to the Conservative aristocracy, were allowed to do what they liked in the provinces and that their subjects were abandoned defenceless to their caprices and their greed. But the particular member of the aristocracy whom it was found necessary to sacrifice, whether he were or were not so great a villain as his enemies asserted, had friends, protectors, and supporters who exerted an influence sufficiently great amongst the dominant party to admit of too ruthless an attack being made upon him.

Cicero himself who apparently attacks Verres with such fury, in reality endeavours to do him as little harm as possible. At every stage of his comments on the serious evidence of the witnesses, he says that, if Verres is not convicted under the lex de pecuniis repetundis, he will accuse him of a greater crime, as though to persuade him that the prosecution has had the utmost possible regard for him. In short, the trial and the condemnation of Verres were a twofold satisfaction which the Roman aristocracy was forced to offer to the public opinion of Italy and to the provinces; but, while offering it, she tried, in every possible way, to temper the blow to the predestined victim. In fact, Verres, though forced to renounce every political ambition, was able to live the life of a grand seigneur quietly in Italy. And that is actually what he did, devoting himself especially to the collection of those works of art for which he had such a passion. After the trial, there is no mention of him in Roman history. He disappears; and, after the year 70, his name does not reappear till more than twenty-seven years later as one of the victims of the famous proscriptions organised in 43 and 42 by Antonius, Lepidus, and Octavianus: the same proscriptions in which Cicero, his accuser, perished. Inasmuch as Verres had been for the elapsed twenty-seven years but an obscure spectator of the political struggles of Rome, it is clear that he must have been included in the lists of the proscribed because his riches excited the cupidity of the Triumvirs.

The famous trial, while it cut short Verres’s political career, brought Cicero’s to the heights of success. The trial of Verres made of Cicero, who up to that time had been a promising young man, one of the foremost political figures in Rome. The Conservative aristocracy recognised in him an orator whose eloquence might be terrible. The Democratic party was grateful to him for the humiliation which he had inflicted on the dominant party. Italy and the provinces welcomed in him the honourable Senator, the disinterested advocate, the intrepid defender of down-trodden justice, the man who had publicly affirmed, at no small risk to himself, that Rome owed it to her own honour to govern with equity and uprightness the immense empire of which fortune had made her mistress. Assuredly, Cicero deserved such admiration, even though his attack on Verres had not been so bitter as the public supposed.

The trial of Verres is the first great page in Cicero’s history. Who could, however, have prophesied to him, in 70, that history would write the name of Verres beside his own yet once again, but on the last page, that of a tragic and glorious death? How life teems with strange coincidences! These two men who confronted each other in one of the most famous legal duels in history, who separated with faces turned towards such diverse destinies—the conqueror to find glory and power, the conquered to find obscurity and seclusion—were fated to meet once more in life, at the last hour, on the brink of the same abyss.

II
THE TRIAL OF CLODIUS

In December of the year 62 B.C., the festival of the Bona Dea was being celebrated as usual in Rome. This goddess was one of Rome’s strangest deities. She represented fertility; and the object of the December ceremonies was to move the goddess to grant that all the fountains of fertility which nourish the life and prosperity of a nation might flow copiously throughout the year. Women only were admitted to the festivities, which were due to take place at night in the house of the Consul or of the Prætor. The wife of the Prætor or of the Consul presided; the lady members of the aristocracy took part; but the master of the house, with all the male slaves, was required to absent himself. It was popularly believed that the man who dared to take part in the mysteries of the Bona Dea would be immediately struck blind.