BY CICERO.
This oration is inserted here to furnish an example of the style of the great Roman orator whose eloquence has been proverbial from his time to the present. His patriotic utterances should stir the blood of the reciter, and if they do this his hearers will share the inspiration.
An opinion has long prevailed, fathers, that, in public prosecutions, men of wealth, however clearly convicted, are always safe. This opinion, so injurious to your order, so detrimental to the state, it is now in your power to refute. A man is on trial before you who is rich, and he hopes his riches will compass his acquittal; but whose life and actions are his sufficient condemnation in the eyes of all candid men. I speak of Caius Verres, who, if he now receive not the sentence his crimes deserve, it shall not be through the lack of a criminal or of a prosecutor, but through the failure of the ministers of justice to do their duty.
Passing over the shameful irregularities of his youth, what does the quæstorship of Verres exhibit but one continued scene of villanies? The public treasure squandered, a consul stripped and betrayed, an army deserted and reduced to want, a province robbed, the civil and religious rights of a people trampled on! But his prætorship in Sicily has crowned his career of wickedness, and completed the lasting monument of his infamy. His decisions have violated all law, all precedent, all right. His extortions from the industrious poor have been beyond computation. Our most faithful allies have been treated as enemies. Roman citizens have, like slaves, been put to death with tortures. Men the most worthy have been condemned and banished without a hearing, while the most atrocious criminals have, with money, purchased exemption from the punishment due to their guilt.
I ask now, Verres, what have you to advance against these charges? Art thou not the tyrant Prætor, who, at no greater distance than Sicily, within sight of the Italian coast, dared to put to an infamous death, on the cross, that ill-fated and innocent citizen, Publius Gavius Cosanus? And what was his offence? He had declared his intention of appealing to the justice of his country against your brutal persecutions!
For this, when about to embark for home, he was seized, brought before you, charged with being a spy, scourged and tortured. In vain did he exclaim: “I am a Roman citizen! I have served under Lucius Pretius, who is now at Panormus, and who will attest my innocence!” Deaf to all remonstrance, remorseless, thirsting for innocent blood, you ordered the savage punishment to be inflicted! While the sacred words, “I am a Roman citizen,” were on his lips—words which, in the remotest regions, are a passport to protection—you ordered him to death—to a death upon the cross!
O liberty! O sound once delightful to every Roman ear! O sacred privilege of Roman citizenship! once sacred—now trampled on! Is it come to this? Shall an inferior magistrate—a governor, who holds his whole power of the Roman people—in a Roman province, within sight of Italy, bind, scourge, torture, and put to an infamous death, a Roman citizen? Shall neither the cries of innocence expiring in agony, the tears of pitying spectators, the majesty of the Roman commonwealth, nor the fear of the justice of his country, restrain the merciless monster, who, in the confidence of his riches, strikes at the very root of liberty, and sets mankind at defiance? And shall this man escape? Fathers, it must not be! It must not be unless you would undermine the very foundations of social safety, strangle justice, and call down anarchy, massacre, and ruin on the commonwealth.