Political Speeches (Oxford World's Classics) (7 page)

VERDICT
: conviction (upon defendant’s failure to appear at second hearing)

Cicero’s speeches
In Verrem
(‘Against Verres’, a corrupt Roman governor of Sicily) are the only forensic (judicial) speeches in this volume, and in fact have more in common with the speeches previously translated in
Defence Speeches
than with the other speeches included here. Nevertheless, the
Verrines
(as they are traditionally known) are political in context and tone: they are concerned with (and are some of our best evidence for) Roman provincial government; and they date from the moment when Sulla’s controversial reforms of eleven years earlier were suddenly swept away. Verres’ trial for extortion (i.e. misconduct while holding a magistracy in the provinces) took place in one of Sulla’s courts, before a jury that consisted exclusively of senators. While the trial was under way, moves were being made to replace the senatorial juries with juries drawn from elsewhere (it was not yet clear from where). In these speeches, Cicero is able to exploit the uncertainty, warning the senators that if they wish to remain in control of the courts, they had better do the right thing by rejecting Verres’ bribes and voting for his conviction.

There are seven
Verrines
in all (referred to as a set by Cicero at
Orator
103, although called the
Accusatio
, ‘Prosecution’, not the
Verrines
); they occupy 464 pages of Latin in the Oxford edition. First there is
Divinatio in Caecilium
(‘Preliminary hearing against Caecilius’), a speech against a rival prosecutor; then
In Verrem
I, the speech which Cicero gave at the first hearing; and finally
In Verrem
II.1–5, the five long speeches which Cicero intended to give at the second hearing, but was unable to because Verres had already fled into exile. In this selection I have chosen to offer the reader the two most famous speeches, I and II.5.
In Verrem
I is the most political of the speeches, the one in which Cicero focuses the jurors’
attention on the political implications of the trial and the possibility that the outcome will influence imminent legislation on the composition of juries. II.5, which is familiarly, though somewhat inaccurately, known as the ‘fifth
Verrine
’ (it is actually the seventh), is perhaps the most entertaining, and certainly the most powerful, of the speeches: it consists of an account of Verres’ scandalous neglect of his military responsibilities as governor, and of his tyrannical cruelty towards Sicilians and Roman citizens in his province.

Gaius Verres was the son of a senator, but did not belong to one of the great Roman aristocratic families. His public career began in 84, during the domination of Cinna: Marius was dead, but Sulla had not yet returned to Italy and taken control of Rome. Verres held the quaestorship, serving under the consul Gnaeus Papirius Carbo, the successor of Cinna (who was killed at the beginning of the year), in Picenum. In the following year he continued under Carbo in Cisalpine Gaul; but then, seeing which way the wind was blowing, he deserted to Sulla, taking Carbo’s military treasury with him. In 82 Sulla captured Rome, had himself appointed dictator, and instituted the proscriptions, rewarding Verres with property taken from proscribed landowners at Beneventum. In 81 he then carried his reforms, a programme designed to restore to the senate the authority and powers it had possessed in the years before the Gracchan reforms nearly half a century earlier. He began by creating 300 new senators, most of whom (like Publius Sulpicius,
Ver
. 30) would have entered the senate, unusually, without first having held the quaestorship. He removed the tribunes’ power to initiate legislation and to exercise limited jurisdiction, curtailed their right of veto, and disqualified them from holding further public office. He also established seven permanent criminal courts, staffed by exclusively senatorial juries, to try the major crimes. It was in one of these new senatorial courts, the one for murder, that the 26-year-old Cicero gave his first speech in a criminal case the following year. This was his sensational
Pro Roscio Amerino
(translated in
Defence Speeches
), the speech which brought him to public notice.

In 80–79 Verres served as a legate under Gnaeus Cornelius Dolabella, and joined him in plundering Cilicia and Asia, a crime for which Dolabella was convicted in 78, after his return to Rome; Verres escaped punishment himself by testifying against his superior. Sulla died in 78, and in 75 the first step was taken in abolishing his reforms: the bar on tribunes holding further public office was removed. In this year Cicero served his quaestorship under Sextus Peducaeus in western Sicily, where by his own account he endeared himself to the provincials by his just management of their affairs; and on his return he became, like all ex-quaestors, a member of the senate. The next year, 74, Verres held the important office of city praetor,
and according to Cicero abused his judicial powers in order to enrich himself, sometimes at the prompting of his mistress Chelido. Finally, in 73–71 he served as governor of Sicily (the normal one-year term was extended because his intended successor, Quintus Arrius, was needed for the war against Spartacus). During these three years, according to Cicero, Verres stripped the province of everything of value, particularly works of art, ran down the military forces which it was his duty to maintain, and illegally executed Roman citizens. We need not believe everything Cicero says regarding his crimes, and in fact the accusation that he ran down the military forces is contradicted by the historian Sallust, who says that he actually strengthened the maritime defence of eastern Sicily (
Histories
4 fr. 32 Maurenbrecher; contrast
Ver
. 2.5.5). Even so, Verres has ever since been universally regarded as the most wicked and exploitative governor in history. He was succeeded in the governorship of Sicily, in 70, by Lucius Caecilius Metellus, who set about putting right some of the damage that his predecessor had caused.

Throughout Verres’ governorship, prominent Sicilians had been complaining to Rome about him; the consuls of 72 had tried to check his behaviour with a senatorial decree, and the tribunes of 71 had carried a resolution protecting one of his victims. As soon as he was no longer in post, all the Sicilian states except Syracuse and Messana (where there were people who had colluded with him or benefited from his actions) joined in asking Cicero to prosecute him. Cicero had been a friend of the Sicilians since his quaestorship in 75, and was now one of the leading advocates in Rome, although he had never undertaken a prosecution. Prosecution of a senior senator was the traditional means by which an aspiring politician, particularly one who was not of noble family (or even, in Cicero’s case, of senatorial family), could attract public notice and win friends and clients; and there was the particular advantage that a successful prosecutor, if a senator, acceded to his victim’s rank of seniority in the senate. Thus, if he were successful against Verres, Cicero would be called on in the senate to speak with those of praetorian rank; this would give him much greater prominence and status. Of course, undertaking a prosecution was also a means of acquiring enemies. But in Verres Cicero was lucky enough to have an opponent who was of relatively undistinguished birth (many of the nobles would have disapproved of him) and whose crimes were genuinely shocking. There was one complication in that Cicero would have to prepare his prosecution at the same time as he was standing for election to a plebeian aedileship for the following year; but he thought at this stage that the trial would be over well before the elections. Indeed, the prosecution would probably assist his campaign. It had become clear that the consuls of 70, Pompey and Crassus, intended to
sweep away much of Sulla’s remaining legislation. In the first half of the year, they restored the powers of the tribunes in full (this is referred to as having already taken place at
Ver
. 46). But it was unclear what was going to be done about the senatorial juries, which were unpopular and were believed to have been responsible for a number of miscarriages of justice. Cicero planned to use his prosecution to speak about the issue, and to threaten the jury with the possibility that a miscarriage of justice in this case would result in senatorial juries being abolished—replaced, very likely, by equestrian ones. Such a line would certainly give Cicero a political prominence, and the popular tone of his remarks would stand him in good stead with the plebeian assembly (which elected the plebeian aediles). For all these reasons, therefore, he accepted the invitation of the Sicilians, and in January of 70 he formally applied to Manius Acilius Glabrio, the praetor in charge of the extortion court, for permission to prosecute Verres for misconduct as governor of Sicily.

At this point we must pause to consider the history and procedure of the extortion court at Rome. The first permanent extortion court (and Rome’s first permanent court) was set up by the
lex Calpurnia
in 149
BC
. Its procedure was civil; the jurors were senators, and the penalty on conviction was simple restitution of the property stolen. Later, in 122 (or 123), the
lex Acilia
was carried by an associate of Gaius Gracchus, Manius Acilius Glabrio, the father of the praetor who presided over Verres’ trial. This law, the text of which survives on a fragmentary bronze inscription known as the
Tabula Bembina
, established a new permanent extortion court with criminal procedures that were to serve as a model for the criminal courts that were established later. The jurors were
equites
(who would be much less likely to be lenient towards the senatorial defendants than their senatorial predecessors); the penalty was double restitution of the property stolen. In the years which followed, the extortion court became a political battleground between the senators and the
equites
. In 106 the
lex Servilia Caepionis
changed the juries in the extortion court to a mix of senators and
equites
; but exclusively equestrian juries were restored in
c
. 104 by the
lex Servilia Glauciae
, which also established a new feature of procedure, a compulsory adjournment of at least one day (
comperendinatio
) during the course of the trial. This meant that the trial would be split into two separate hearings; in effect, the whole case would be gone over twice. In 81 Sulla, as we have seen, carried a
lex Cornelia
which enacted a complete reform of the criminal courts and prescribed exclusively senatorial juries for all of them. For the extortion court, the method of selection and the size of the jury were also changed, and an official penalty of death appears to have been added to the financial penalty. As in the other courts, however, a death penalty for criminals of
high social status meant in practice merely self-imposed or ‘voluntary’ exile in a federate (thus technically non-Roman) state, followed by interdiction (debarment from fire and water, in other words outlawry). As long a criminal did not return to Italy, he would be safe.

The procedure in the Sullan extortion court (in which Verres was tried) was as follows. Each year a jury list (
album
) was compiled from the 600 or so members of the senate, and the names on the list were divided into numbered panels (
decuriae
). When the praetor in charge of the court accepted a case for trial, a panel was assigned to it, and jurors were selected from that panel by lot (
sortitio
). Each side could reject a set number of these jurors (
reiectio
), and the jurors who remained would be those who would sit on the case. The final number of jurors is unknown, and may have been as small as twelve or fifteen—a very low number by Roman standards, and one which may have contributed to the problem of judicial corruption during the 70s. The actual trial was divided into two hearings, as prescribed by the
lex Servilia Glauciae
. In the first, prosecution and then defence each made full-scale speeches (
orationes perpetuae
), after which the evidence was taken and witnesses cross-examined; then in the second hearing prosecution and then defence each made further full-scale speeches. So the speeches in the first hearing would refer forward to evidence that had not yet been revealed and would only be known to one side or the other (the usual custom in other criminal courts, where there was as far as we know only a single hearing), whereas those in the second would refer back to evidence which had already been heard and examined. At the end of the second hearing, the jurors (but not the praetor) voted by secret ballot to acquit, convict, or abstain, and the verdict was reached by majority (if the votes were equal the defendant was acquitted). If the defendant was found guilty, he would retire into exile within a few days (he was not required to vanish instantly). A separate session would then be held at a later date to assess the damages to be paid from his estate to the injured party (
litis aestimatio
).

In January of 70, then, Glabrio received Cicero’s application to prosecute Verres. But he also received a second application to undertake the same prosecution, submitted by Quintus Caecilius Niger, who had been Verres’ quaestor in Sicily in 72 (probably, like Cicero, in western Sicily). It is not clear whether Caecilius genuinely wished to see Verres convicted (as Cicero maintains at
Ver
. 2.1.15) or whether he was in collusion with him (as he maintains at
Div. Caec
. 12–13, 23, 29, and 58); at all events, the Sicilians had approached Cicero, and Verres must have wanted Caecilius, who was the lesser orator. A preliminary hearing (
divinatio
) was held to decide which man should be given the case. Cicero delivered
Divinatio in Caecilium
, and was judged the more suitable prosecutor; Caecilius was
even denied the right to join him as assistant prosecutor (which suggests that collusion was suspected). Cicero then formally brought the charge, requesting 110 days to go to Sicily to collect evidence. Given the difficulty of travelling, this was a very short period, but he wished to have the trial out of the way as early as possible so that he could turn his attention to his campaign for the aedileship. The trial must have been scheduled to begin around the beginning of May.