Political Speeches (Oxford World's Classics) (13 page)

[20] I am not going to defend Apollonius, though he is a friend of mine and someone whose hospitality I have enjoyed: I do not want to seem to be overturning your verdict. I will say nothing about his sober habits, his excellent qualities, his capacity for hard work. I will pass over the point I have already made, that his wealth was tied up in slaves, livestock, farms, and investments, and that any rising or war in Sicily would therefore have been as disastrous to him as to anyone. I will not even make the point that, supposing Apollonius were wholly guilty, as the most honourable man in a most honourable city he ought not to have been so severely punished without a trial. [21] Nor will I stir up hatred against you, not even by referring to how, when such an admirable man was lying in prison, in darkness, in squalor, and in rags, your tyrannical orders forbade his aged father and his young son from ever visiting him in his wretchedness. I will also pass over the fact that, each time you came to Panhormus during those eighteen months (for Apollonius was in prison as long as that), the senate of Panhormus, together with the magistrates and priests of the city, came to you in supplication, begging and beseeching that that poor, innocent man be finally set free from the disaster which had overtaken him. All these points I will forgo. But if I wished to pursue them, I could easily demonstrate that, by your cruelty towards others, you have long ago debarred yourself from the clemency that the jurors might otherwise show to you.

[22] All such arguments I will concede to you and refrain from using. For I can see what Hortensius’ defence will be. He will admit
that neither the age of the father, nor the youth of the son, nor the tears of either of them carried more weight with Verres than the welfare and safety of his province. He will say that the state cannot be governed without strictness and intimidation. He will ask why rods of office
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are carried before the governors, why axes are granted to them, why a prison has been constructed, and why so many punishments have traditionally been prescribed for criminals. When he has said all of this, so sternly and impressively, I shall then ask why Verres, after no new facts had come to light and no defence had been made, suddenly, for no apparent reason, ordered that this same Apollonius should be released from prison. And I shall venture to suggest that the grounds for suspicion on this charge are so strong that I may now leave it to the jurors themselves, without any argument on my part, to draw their own conclusions as to what type of robbery this would appear to be, how wicked, how scandalous, and how immense and boundless in its scope for gain.

[23] Now first please briefly consider the number and extent of the sufferings which Verres inflicted upon Apollonius—then weigh them up and reckon how much they are worth in terms of money. What you will find is that they were all directed at this one wealthy individual with the aim of making other people afraid of what could happen to them, and giving them examples of the dangers that they too could face. To begin with, there was the sudden allegation of a capital and hateful crime. Decide how much you think that is worth, and how many people must have paid up to avoid it. Next there was the charge made without a prosecutor, the verdict given without a court, the conviction handed down without a defence. Calculate the price of each of these injustices, and reflect that it was only Apollonius who fell victim to them—which means that there must have been an awful lot of people who escaped by paying up. Finally, there was the darkness, the chains, the prison, the punishment of being locked up, and being locked away from the sight of one’s parents and children, and from the open air and the light of day—the things which all other people freely enjoy. These are punishments which people may justifiably give their lives to escape; I do not myself think they can be reckoned up in terms of money.

[24] In the end Apollonius did indeed escape them—but by then he was a broken man. Nevertheless, his example served to teach everyone else that they must strike a deal with this avaricious criminal
before they too suffered the same fate. For you cannot seriously believe that so wealthy a man was selected to face so implausible a charge for any reason other than financial gain, or that he was suddenly released from prison for any different reason, or that Verres tried and applied this method of robbery only in the case of Apollonius, and that he did not use that man’s punishment as a means of striking fear into all the rich men in Sicily.

[25] I hope, members of the jury, that Verres will remind me, while I am on the subject of his military glory, of any point that I should happen to leave out. I think I have now managed to cover all of his achievements that relate to the possibility of a slave war; at least I am certain that I have not consciously omitted anything. You have all the facts to do with his planning, his diligence, his watchfulness, and his defence and guardianship of his province. There is, it is true, more than one type of general, and my main purpose is that you should understand to which type he belongs. These days, there is a general lack of fine soldiers,
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and so it is important that no one should continue to be unaware of the sort of commander we have in Verres. His is not the wisdom of Quintus Maximus, nor the speed in action of the elder Africanus, nor the exceptional intelligence of the younger one, nor the systematic discipline of Paullus, nor indeed the vigour and valour of Gaius Marius.
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No, as I will explain to you, Verres was a different sort of general altogether—one we should be sure to retain and cherish!

[26] First, regarding the laborious task of travelling—quite the most important aspect of soldiering, gentlemen, and in Sicily the most essential task of all—allow me to tell you how straightforward and indeed agreeable Verres, by his intelligent planning, made this for himself. To begin with, to counteract the extreme cold in winter and the violence of the storms and swollen rivers, he devised for himself the perfect expedient. He chose the city of Syracuse, whose situation, topography, and climate are said to be such that even during the most wild and stormy weather there has never been a day when the sun has not been visible at least part of the time. Here this fine general lived during the winter months, and he was so much at home there that it was not often that anyone saw him out of doors, or even standing up. The short days were taken up with eating, and the long nights with unspeakable sexual acts.

[27] But when spring came round—whose arrival he discerned
not from the west wind, nor from the stars, but when he saw the first roses:
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that was for him the first sign of spring—then at that point he turned to the laborious business of travelling. And in this he proved himself so tough and energetic that no one ever saw him riding on a horse. Instead, as the Bithynian kings used to do, he had himself conveyed by eight bearers in a litter, one which boasted a diaphanous divan of Maltese wool, stuffed with rose petals. He wore one garland on his head, another round his neck, and to his nostrils he clasped a delicate, fine-meshed linen sachet, again filled with rose petals. Whenever he arrived at some town, after completing his march in the manner described, he had himself carried in this same litter straight into the bedroom. There the Sicilian magistrates would come to visit him, there the Roman equestrians would come, as you have heard from numerous sworn witnesses. Legal disputes were submitted to him there in secret, and shortly afterwards his decisions were carried forth. Then when a short time later he had finished making legal rulings in his bedroom—on considerations of money, not justice—he concluded that he owed the rest of his time to Venus and to Bacchus.

[28] While we are on this subject I think I should not pass over our glorious general’s outstanding, unique diligence. For I have to tell you that, in all the towns in Sicily where governors stay and hold assizes, there is none in which a woman from a respectable family was not specially selected to satisfy his lusts. Some of these were openly brought to his table, while any who were more modest in their behaviour came later at a prearranged time, avoiding the light and the crowd of people. His dinner parties were not the quiet affairs one expects with governors and generals, nor the decorous occasions that magistrates put on, but were noisy and bad-mannered events; sometimes they even descended into hand-to-hand fighting. For this strict, diligent governor, although he never obeyed the laws of the Roman people, carefully observed all the drinking rules that are prescribed at parties. And his entertainments generally ended up with someone being carried from the feast as if from the battlefield, someone else being left for dead, and the majority sprawling, with no awareness of who or where they were—so that anyone who saw them would believe that they were looking not at a governor’s official dinner, but at an outrage reminiscent of Cannae.
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[29] As soon as midsummer arrived, the period which all previous
governors of Sicily have always spent travelling, believing that to be the best time for inspecting the province, when the grain is on the threshing-floor—because that is when the slaves are all brought into one place and can see how many of them there are, and that is when their work is particularly onerous, and the sheer volume of the grain makes an impression on them, and the time of year does not stand in their way
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—at this time, I tell you, when the other governors have always kept on the move, this general of an entirely new type built himself a fixed camp in the loveliest part of Syracuse.

[30] At the mouth of the harbour, where the gulf from the open sea begins to turn inwards from the coast towards the city,
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he sited a series of marquees made out of linen sheeting. Moving out of the governor’s residence, which was the former palace of King Hiero,
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he took up residence here instead, and during that whole period no one ever saw him in any other place. The only people who were allowed access to it were those who could share in, or satisfy, his lust. Here flocked all the women with whom he had been passing his time (and it is remarkable what a large number of them there were in Syracuse);
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here came the men, too, who were worthy to be his friends—worthy, that is, to share in his style of life and his revelries. It was among men and women of this sort that his teenage son socialized, so that even if his nature made him less like his father, his nurture and habits made him his father’s son.

[31] The arrival here of the woman Tertia, separated from her Rhodian piper by violence and trickery,
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is said to have caused great disruption in Verres’ camp. The aristocratic wife of Cleomenes of Syracuse and the wife of Aeschrio,
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a woman of good family, took exception to the inclusion of the daughter of Isidorus the pantomime actor within their social circle. But this Hannibal here thought that in his camp promotion should be by merit and not by birth,
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and indeed he thought so highly of this woman Tertia that he actually took her away with him when he returned home from his province.

Throughout this period while, dressed in a purple Greek cloak and a tunic down to the ankles, he was enjoying himself with his women, nobody minded or took it amiss that the governor was absent from the forum, legal disputes were not being heard, and the courts were not in session. That place by the shore might re-echo all around with women’s voices and the sound of music, and in the forum the silence of the courts and the law might be complete—but
nobody minded. For it seemed to them as if what was absent from the forum was not legal business, but violence, brutality, and the cruel and shocking plundering of their property.

[32] So you are basing your defence on his ability as a general, Hortensius? Are you trying to hide his thefts, his robberies, his greed, his cruelty, his arrogance, his criminality, and his wickedness behind his great achievements and his glory as a general? I suppose I should be afraid that at the end of your speech you will have recourse to that old oratorical trick which Antonius was the first to use,
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that you will bring Verres forward, bare his chest, and let the Roman people gaze on his scars—women’s love-bites, the evidence of his wickedness and sexual excess! [33] I beg the gods that you actually will have the gall to bring up his military service, his service in war! Then the whole of his military career will be exposed, and you will find out not only how he conducted himself when he was in command, but how he behaved in the ranks. His early ‘service’ will be gone over again, the period when he used to be pulled out of the forum rather than, as he himself maintains, pulled in it.
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The camp of the gambler from Placentia
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will be mentioned, a place where he was on duty so regularly that his pay was stopped. Indeed, his many financial losses from his time in the ranks will be referred to—debts which were paid off and discharged from the proceeds of his youth.

[34] Eventually he became hardened by his submission to this sort of disgrace, by which time others—though not himself—had tired of it. Do you really need me to tell you what kind of a man he was by that stage, and how many well-guarded strongholds of modesty and chastity he captured by force and recklessness? And do you really want me to tell you of scandals which dishonoured other people too? I will not do this, gentlemen; I will pass over all these things that took place some time ago. Two scandals only I will put before you, recent ones which do not reflect badly on anyone else; and from them you will be able to come to your own conclusions about everything that I leave out. The first is so famous and universally well known that no peasant coming to Rome from his home town on legal business during the consulship of Lucius Lucullus and Marcus Cotta
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would have been unaware of it—that all the judgements of the city praetor were decided on the say-so of the tart Chelido. The other is that when Verres had already left the city in his general’s cloak, and had already pronounced the solemn vows for his tenure of
office and the general welfare of the country, he used to have himself carried back inside the city
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in a litter at night, in order to commit adultery with a woman who was married to one man but available to everyone. This practice was against morality, against the auspices, and against every religious principle human and divine.