Political Speeches (Oxford World's Classics) (15 page)

[51] When this treaty was originally drafted, what effort, trouble, and money do you think the people of Messana would not have been happy to expend in order to avoid the insertion of this clause about the bireme, if there had been any possibility at all of obtaining this from our ancestors? For the imposition of so onerous an obligation on the city somehow brought to that treaty of alliance a suggestion, one might say, of servitude. Even though they had recently done us good service,
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and the matter was still open, and the Roman people were not in trouble, nevertheless the people of Messana failed to induce our ancestors to remove the clause from the treaty. But now, when they have done us no further services, and we are many years further on, with our demand of them under the treaty having been made and upheld every year, and at a time when the Roman people are very much in trouble regarding ships, the people of Messana finally obtain this concession from Gaius Verres—for a bribe. And not only do they obtain the concession not to provide a ship: during the three years of your governorship, did Messana provide a single soldier, a single sailor to serve either in the fleet, or in the garrison?

[52] Finally, although a senatorial decree and the Terentian-Cassian law
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required grain to be purchased equally from all the Sicilian states, you exempted Messana from this too—even though the requirement was not burdensome and fell equally on all. You will answer that Messana was not obliged to supply us with grain. To supply in what sense? Do you mean not obliged to sell it to us? For we are not talking about grain required as tribute, but grain we would pay for. All right, then; on your interpretation of the treaty, Messana had no obligation to assist the Roman people even by trading with them and selling them supplies. [53] What state, then, did have an obligation to do this? There is no uncertainty as to what the farmers of public land were obliged to supply as it is stipulated in the censors’ law;
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why, then, did you require them to supply a further amount on a different basis? As for those farmers who were liable to pay the tithe stipulated by the law of Hiero,
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surely they were not obliged to provide anything over and above the basic tithe? In that
case, why did you fix an additional amount of grain that they had to sell to us? And then what of the states that were exempt? They at least did not have to supply anything. But not only did you make them sell us grain, you made them supply more than they were capable of, by making them produce the annual 60,000 measures which you had exempted Messana from providing. Now I am not saying that Verres was wrong to require all these states to sell us grain. What I am saying is that Messana was in the same position as the others; that all previous governors had required it to sell us grain just like the other states, and had paid for it in accordance with the senatorial decree and the law;
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and that Verres was wrong to give Messana an exemption.

Verres wanted to hammer into place his so-called benefaction, and so he brought Messana’s case before his council, and then announced that, on the advice of the council, he would not require Messana to sell us grain. [54] Please listen to the decree of this mercenary governor, taken from his own notebook,
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and note how sober the language is, and how impressive his settling of this point of law. Please read it out.

(
The decree is read to the court from the notebook
.)

He says that he freely grants the concession on the advice of his council; that is how he records it. But what if you had not used the word ‘freely’? I suppose we would conclude that you took the bribe grudgingly! And ‘on the advice of his council’? Gentlemen, you heard the membership of this eminent body being read out. As you listened, did you think it was a governor’s council whose names you were hearing, or the partners and associates of an outrageous thief? [55] Here are our interpreters of treaties, our devisers of alliances, our authorities in religion!
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Every time there has ever been an official purchase of grain in Sicily, Messana has been required to provide its share—until this select and distinguished council gave Verres permission to take money from that city and behave in his customary fashion. His decree remained in force for no longer than it deserved to, given that it had been issued by someone who had sold his decision to people from whom he should, by contrast, have been buying grain. For as soon as Lucius Metellus succeeded him as governor, he reverted to the written precedent of Gaius Sacerdos and Sextus Peducaeus,
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and required Messana to sell us grain. [56] At that point the people of Messana realized that they could no longer keep the
concession they had bought from a man who had had no right to sell it to them in the first place.

Well now, you who wanted to be thought so conscientious an interpreter of treaties, answer me this: why did you require Tauromenium to sell us grain, and why did you require Netum to do so? They are both federate states. Indeed, the people of Netum stood up for their rights. As soon as you announced that you were freely exempting Messana, they came to see you and pointed out that their case under the treaty was the same as its. You could hardly make a different ruling when their case was exactly the same, and so you announced that Netum did not have to supply grain—but then forced them to supply it anyway. Let us hear the governor’s documents relating to the decrees he made and the grain he required to be sold.

(
The documents relating to the decrees are read to the court
.)

In view of this glaring, shocking inconsistency, gentlemen, how can we avoid the inescapable conclusion? Either he asked Netum for money and they refused to pay, or else he intended to make the people of Messana realize how wise they had been to invest so many gifts and bribes in him, when others in the same position were not able to obtain the concession that they had obtained.

[57] At this point he will no doubt have the temerity to point out that the people of Messana have submitted a testimonial in his favour. But I am sure that none of you, gentlemen, will fail to appreciate the degree to which a testimonial of this kind will damage his case. In the first place, when a defendant cannot produce ten people to give testimonials for him, it is better that he should produce none at all than fail to produce the requisite number prescribed by custom. Sicily has a great many cities, and you were their governor for three whole years; yet most of those cities give evidence against you, a few minor ones are intimidated and say nothing, and one, only, praises you. What are we to conclude from this except that you understand the advantage of a genuine testimonial, but that the character of your administration of the province was of a kind which must inevitably deprive you of this advantage? [58] In the second place, as I said in one of the earlier speeches, what does it say about a testimonial when the delegates sent to deliver it, including their leaders, have stated that, collectively, they built you a ship, and individually they were robbed and plundered by you? Finally, when the people of Messana are the only ones in the whole of Sicily to speak in
your favour, what else are they actually doing other than testifying to us that it was they to whom you passed on everything that you had stolen from our country? In Italy, what settlement of citizens is there so privileged, what town with citizen rights is there so free of responsibilities as to have enjoyed, during those years, such a profitable exemption from all burdens as Messana has enjoyed? For those three years, they were the only people who did not provide what they were obliged by their treaty to do, they were the only people under Verres who were exempt from all burdens, they were the only ones under his governorship who lived under this principle—that they need not give the Roman people anything, so long as they denied Verres nothing.

[59] But let me return to the fleet, the subject from which I digressed. You accepted one ship from Messana against the laws, and you exempted another one against the treaties. Thus in the case of this single city you have twice revealed yourself to be a criminal, in both exempting what you ought not to have exempted and accepting what you should not have accepted. You ought to have demanded a ship to sail against looters, not one to sail away with loot, a ship to prevent the province being despoiled, not to carry away the province’s spoils. The people of Messana provided you with a city in which to collect together your various thefts from far and wide, and a ship in which to transport them to their destination. That town was a holding area for your plunder; those people were the witnesses and custodians of your thefts; those people provided you with a place to store your plunder, and a vessel in which to remove it. The result of this was that, even when you had lost the fleet through your wickedness and greed, you still did not go so far as to make Messana supply a ship. At a time when the shortage of ships was so severe, and when Sicily was in such danger, they would surely have given you a ship, even if you had had to ask them as a favour. But your power to command and even your freedom to make a request were taken away by that famous vessel—not a bireme contributed to the Roman people, but a merchant ship presented to the governor. That was the price of our sovereignty, of the aid they were required to supply, and of their exemption from their legal obligation, from precedent, and from their treaty.

[60] You have now heard how the valuable aid of one particular state was lost and sold for a bribe. Now let me inform you of a
completely new method of plundering first devised by the defendant. It always used to be the case that each state gave all the money to be spent on the fleet—for pay, subsistence, and so on—directly to their captain. He would never dare risk being accused of wrongdoing by the men under his command, and he also had to submit accounts to his fellow-citizens; so his job involved not only work, but personal risk. This, as I say, was the universal practice not only in Sicily, but in all the provinces, as well as being the practice with the pay and expenses of the Italian allies and Latins, in the days when they provided us with auxiliary troops.
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Verres was the first person since our empire was founded to rule that all the money from the states should be paid over to himself, and that it should be a man of his own appointment who handled the money. [61] Who can be in any doubt as to why you were the first to change such a universal and longstanding practice, why you disregarded the considerable advantage of having others take responsibility for the money, and why you took on such a difficult and troublesome task which would result in your being suspected and accused of wrongdoing?

Next, other schemes for making money were set in motion—and notice how many of them come under this heading of the fleet. He accepted bribes from states which wanted to escape their obligation to supply sailors; he exempted individual sailors from service for a fixed sum; he pocketed all the pay of those he had exempted; and he withheld the pay that was owed to the rest. Listen to the proof of all these charges from the evidence of the states themselves. Please read it out.

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The evidence of the states is read to the court
.)

[62] Look at this man, members of the jury, look at his effrontery, look at his audacity! That he should draw up a list of the sums of money that each state should pay him, according to how many sailors were to be exempted! And that he should fix on the specific sum of six hundred sesterces as the price for exempting an individual sailor! The man who handed over that amount secured exemption from service for the entire summer, whereas Verres pocketed the amount which he had taken for that sailor’s pay and subsistence. In this way he profited twice over from each exemption. The province was suffering from pirate attacks and was in considerable danger, but this lunatic conducted this business so openly that even the pirates themselves were aware of it, and the whole province was a witness to it.

[63] As a result of this greed of Verres’, the Sicilian fleet was a fleet in name only: in reality it consisted of empty vessels more suited to bringing loot to the governor than terror to the pirates. Even so, while Publius Caesetius and Publius Tadius
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were sailing around in their ten half-manned craft, they did come across one particular pirate ship, loaded with plunder—a ship they did not so much overwhelm as tow away, since it was already overwhelmed and indeed half-sunk by the load it was carrying. It was full of very good looking young men,
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full of silverware and silver coin, and it also contained a large quantity of textiles. This ship, all on its own, was not actually captured by our fleet, but merely discovered off Megaris,
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a place not far from Syracuse. When the news was brought to Verres, he was lying on the beach with some girls, drunk. All the same, he managed to lift himself up, and immediately sent several of his guards to his quaestor and his legate with instructions that everything be brought to him intact as soon as possible for him to inspect.

[64] So the ship was taken to Syracuse, and everyone was expecting to see due punishment carried out. But Verres behaved as if plunder had been brought before him, not as if pirates had been captured. Any of the pirates and their captives that were old and ugly, he treated as enemies; but any who possessed any youth, beauty, or technical skill he took away and distributed among his secretaries, his staff, and his son, while six musicians he sent as a present to a friend of his in Rome. The whole night was spent unloading the ship. Nobody saw the captain of the pirates, who ought to have been executed. Today everyone believes—and I will let you judge for yourselves whether they are right or not—that Verres was secretly bribed by the pirates to spare their captain.

[65] ‘But that is just a guess.’ No one can be a competent juror if he does not pay heed to plausible suspicions. You know that man. And you also know the universal practice whereby someone who has captured a pirate or enemy leader will be only too delighted to display him publicly in front of everyone. Gentlemen, out of all of the considerable number of Roman citizens at Syracuse I did not meet a single one who claimed to have seen the captured pirate captain, despite the fact that everyone, as is the custom, and as always happens, had come together in a crowd and asked where he was and demanded to see him. What happened to cause that man to be hidden away so completely, so that no one was able to catch even the slightest
glimpse of him? The people who lived on the coast at Syracuse had often heard that pirate’s name and shuddered at the very mention of it. They wanted to feast their eyes and glut their souls on his torture and execution. But no one was even permitted to set eyes on him.