It is, therefore, not strange that after the slave wars Sicily should have accumulated great wealth, especially as the island was, on the whole, well governed during that period, between the years 99 B.C. and 73 B.C. During the latter part of this time the office of quaestor, treasurer, in the western division, was held by Cicero, then a young man of thirty years, six years older than Julius Caesar. It was during his quaestorship that he acquired the profound knowledge of Sicily which he displayed in his speeches against Verres, one of the most atrocious robbers of any age. It was then that he wandered in the neighbourhood of Syracuse, accompanied by a flattering court of distinguished Syracusans, who were not anxious to show him the tomb of Archimedes overgrown with brambles, because the great engineer had been an enemy to the Romans, and were quite willing to let the mild-mannered, book-loving quaestor give himself all the credit of the discovery. Of Cicero’s earlier and later life it is useless to speak here, but it is necessary to dwell a little upon the evil career of the great criminal from whose robberies the cities of Sicily never entirely recovered. Cicero’s speeches, on which the evidence against him rests, undoubtedly contained exaggerations, and were necessarily prejudiced, but the consequences of Verres’ government are undeniable. It must be remembered, too, that Verres was found guilty on the evidence of the thousands of witnesses who appeared against him, and that he escaped to Marseilles, where he spent the rest of his life, before the hearing was over. Only two of the seven speeches were delivered; the rest were compiled from the records of the case, but not spoken. The great Hortensius, engaged to defend the accused, abandoned the case, though he was reckoned the most eloquent lawyer of his day, with the possible exception of Cicero himself.
Verres was of noble birth, the son of a senator, who shared the plunder with him and defended him in the senate during his outrageous proceedings in the provinces. At the age of thirty, or little less, the young man was quaestor in Northern Italy, being then a partisan of Marius; but when he saw that Sulla was getting the better of the struggle, he promptly deserted to him, and was well received. He did not omit to steal all the public money then in his keeping, for which deed, in consideration of his accession to the party of Sulla, the latter never called him to account. Next, in the year 80 B.C., he was sent as legate to Asia Minor under Dolabella, a man of his own stamp, and it became his business to steal and extort money for his superior and himself.
He possessed the most admirable taste in matters of art, and, like more than one famous thief, he had the spirit of a collector. Beside his love of statues and pictures, his gross vices sink into insignificance; his greed of money, and his cruelty in obtaining it, alone rival his passion for works of beauty. He shut up the chief official at Sicyon in a closet and smoked him with green wood till he was almost dead, merely to obtain gold. He stole pictures and statues in Achaia; he took a quantity of gold from the temple of Pallas in Athens; he carried off the best statues from the temple of Apollo in Delos; he plundered Tenedos, Chios, and Samos, and positively ravaged Pamphylia. His operations were conducted on a gigantic scale, and he carried off the treasures of the temples in carts and in broad daylight. When the treasurer of the province died, Dolabella made Verres pro-treasurer, and in this office he extended his oppression throughout Milyas, Pisidia, and parts of Phrygia. As guardian, he robbed the only son of his best friend when the latter was dead; he robbed his enemies, the public, and the treasury, and returned to Italy with such a sum of money as enabled him to obtain a praetorship in Rome. He now turned his talents towards obtaining bribes in the cases which came before him for decision, and in robbing the fund for public buildings. On the ingenious excuse that the columns of the temple of Castor and Pollux were not all exactly perpendicular, though the error could only be detected by means of a plumb-line, he succeeded in upsetting a contract for the construction, in favour of another contractor, in which transaction he pocketed large sums of money. But in comparison with what he did afterwards, his doings in Asia Minor and in Rome must be looked upon as mere exercises, in which he obtained the experience necessary for a career of destructive robbery that has never been equalled. So, in modern Naples, and perhaps elsewhere, thieves set their children to pick the pockets of a lay figure that rings bells at the least incautious touch.
In 73 B.C. Verres obtained the propraetorship of Sicily by lot. He held it three years, and left his mark of desolation upon its cities for centuries, if not forever. During the term of his office, the insurrection of the gladiators and slaves under Spartacus required all Rome’s energy, and since Verres kept Sicily in subjection, and there were no signs of an outbreak under his governorship, he was allowed to do as he pleased until the measure of his iniquities was full, and he was finally called to account.
The story of his three years’ government in Sicily, as told by Cicero in the Verrine orations, reads alternately like a fairy story and like a tale of almost prehistoric barbarism. It is a strange fact that when the staid Roman temper broke out and overstepped all bounds, Romans went to lengths of fantastic display on the one hand and of horrible cruelty on the other which surpassed what we know of Greeks or Phoenicians. Cicero draws a picture of Verres during his stay in Syracuse, and of his official journeys, in which we see the Roman propraetor carried by eight stalwart slaves in a litter, lying upon cushions stuffed with rose leaves, clad in transparent gauze and Maltese lace, with garlands of roses on his head and round his neck, and delicately sniffing at a little net filled also with roses, lest any other odour should offend his nostrils. He had an artistic soul, and delighted in details that pleased the sense. He loved beauty, and wherever he went the fairest of the Sicilian ladies were his guests, while he robbed their fathers, their husbands, and their brothers. This important business, which was, indeed, the main one of his life, was everywhere managed with precision and despatch. He was never at a loss for an excuse for extorting money from a rich man. One of his methods was to seize upon valuable favourite slaves of great landholders, accusing them of conspiring against him and condemning them to death at his pleasure, only that their masters might ransom them at ten times their value. Or, he would accuse of conspiracy a slave who had no existence, and then imprison the master for not producing the fictitious delinquent. The unfortunate owner had the choice of ransoming himself at a ruinous price or of languishing in prison for an unlimited length of time. He spent the winter and generally the summer in Syracuse, where there is no winter’s day without sunshine and no summer’s noon without the cool sea breeze. In the warm months he pitched his tents of fine linen at the entrance of the harbour, most probably under the shadow of the Plemmyrian promontory, where the breeze blows all day, and there he spent his time dressed in the effeminate tunic and purple cloak of the Greeks, in the company of his youthful son, who gave promise of imitating his father, surrounded by his cohort of flatterers, panders, and henchmen, curled and perfumed like himself. The Syracusan ladies came to his feasts, and sometimes complained bitterly when the daughter of a comic actor was treated with as much ceremony as themselves; but still they came, and lingered, and came again.
It was an organized robbery, and Verres needed a base of operations and a harbour of export, whence he could ship his booty to his Italian estates. These appear to have been conveniently situated for the purpose in the neighbourhood of Velia, once Elea, the home of philosophy, but now, if it has a name, called Ascea. There, a little to the south of Licosa point, the small stream of the Alento swells to a torrent in winter and shrinks to a rivulet under the summer sun, when the air is poisoned with the southern fever. The fishermen beach their boats upon the sandy shore where Verres landed the wealth of Sicily from the great freight ship he had caused the Sicilians to build for him, for this sole purpose. But the base of operations he chose in Sicily was Messina; and in order that the Mamertine inhabitants might be friendly to him, and might not hinder his proceedings, he spared their city when he plundered all the rest, and excused them from contributions of cornº and from supplying a ma
n-of‑war for the Sicilian fleet, which they would otherwise have been bound to do. Moreover, they were not obliged to supply soldiers and sailors for the service. In other cities he made a regular charge for giving the supposed soldiers and seamen permanent leave, at a fixed price, by the year. It is needless to say that besides the price of the leave given, the ingenious governor pocketed the pay which would have been due if the men had served their time.
He neglected the fleet altogether, and the consequence was that Cilician pirates infested the waters about the island. Considering what has been done before and since in Sicily, it may well be supposed that Verres had a standing agreement with the pirates themselves. Once, however, in a fit of conscientiousness, he allowed two of his officers with ten men-of‑war to capture, near Megara, a pirate vessel so heavily laden that it was not able to get away. He appropriated the cargo, which consisted of the most valuable booty, to his own use, picked out the old and useless men among the crew and threw them into prison, gave the young and handsome ones to his friends as slaves, and sent six musicians, who were found among them, to Rome, as a present to his lawyer, Hortensius. As for the captain of the pirates, no one ever saw him, but some time afterwards, Verres caused a poor Roman citizen, who was perfectly innocent, to be executed for his crimes. When Syracuse rose in indignation and demanded the execution of the pirates, the governor took a number of other persons from prison and caused them to be put to death with their heads covered, lest they should be recognized.
He was now obliged by public opinion to take some action against the pirates, and he sent out a small squadron in pursuit of them. The vessels sailed out with flying colours, and with every appearance of being fit for the expedition; but in reality they were short handed, and were so completely unprovided with provisions that when they reached Pachynus, a few miles to the southward, the whole company went ashore to seek for food, and, finding nothing better, they dug up the scrub palms and ate the roots. At the first news that pirates were in the vicinity, the commander cut his cable rather than lose time in getting the anchor up, made sail, and, having the best vessel, was out of sight almost before the ships he commanded could get under way. The pirates overhauled them on the high sea, took the men prisoners, and burnt the vessels. The news was known in Syracuse late at night, when Verres had retired to rest after an orgy; but no one dared to wake the sleeping governor. He was roused by the voices of the multitude without, and, when he appeared at dawn in military dress, he barely escaped being torn to pieces. Four pirate vessels quietly sailed into the harbour of Syracuse, and, coming close to the shore, their crews pelted the infuriated crowd with the roots of the scrub palms found in the ill-fated Roman vessels. The pirates departed in peace, and before long the unfortunate captains of the Roman ships were ransomed. Verres, of course, arrested them and condemned them to death as an example, and they were handed over to the executioner, who exacted a large sum of money from their relatives in return for his promise that they should have an easy death. Being dead, their goods became the governor’s property, and he exacted a second ransom for them by threatening to let them be devoured by dogs and wolves.
It is easy to imagine the sort of persons by whom Verres was surrounded, men ready for every deed, accessible to every bribe, and quick to invent means of extortion extort. Allowing for the changes of time and the differences in his situation, these fellows represented the life-guard of a tyrant, bound to him by every personal interest, and sharing, in a small degree, in the profits of every crime. Cicero has preserved their names with some of their characteristics. I shall spare the reader both, and go on to tell how in a short time Verres made himself master of the wealth of the island by their assistance. One of his favourite methods was to get possession by legal frauds of large sums of money and other treasures left by will both to individual heirs and to temples. On one occasion he presented a large inheritance to the people of Syracuse with a great show of munificence, but was careful to reserve the greater part of it for himself. It was an easy matter, also, to find persons who had been tried under the previous praetor, but had been found not guilty, and to extort ransoms from them, on promise of not trying them again.
One of the most atrocious acts of Verres was his robbery of Sthenius, the honourable citizen of Thermae who had won the sympathy of Cneiusº Pompeius by frankly assuming the blame of his fellow-citizens’ conduct. He was a collector of works of art, and had spent much of his life in gathering beautiful pictures and statues, Corinthian and Delian bronzes, and the like. Verres, when he was his guest, saw all these things, judged them good enough for his own collection, and seized upon them at once. It was not until he attempted to carry off the statues that belonged to the city itself that Sthenius opposed him. Verres retorted by causing a false accusation to be brought against him, and in spite of the efforts made in Rome in Sthenius’ favour, found him guilty and appropriated his whole fortune. In gratitude to Aphrodite, Verres presented her shrine at Eryx, now San Giuliano, with a beautiful figure of Eros selected from the spoil.
Before long another opportunity of wholesale robbery presented itself. The rebellion which had broken out in Spain under Sertorius, one of the former generals of Marius, was at an end, and Verres conceived the ingenious plan of seizing ships that arrived from the northern coast, on the ground that there were fugitive Sertorians on board of them. The crews were thrown into prison in the Latomie of Syracuse, and were generally executed in the place of pirates who were allowed to escape, while the cargoes of the vessels became the governor’s property. From this time his cruelties increased with his greed. He caused a Roman citizen to be scourged and crucified, which was a crime against the liberty of the Roman people; he beheaded more than a hundred Roman citizens; he slew whom he pleased, and in every case he seized the victim’s goods. Moreover, he caused enormous sums to be appropriated to erect statues to himself, not only in the Sicilian cities, but even in Rome.
The most wholesale of all his robberies was that of the corn which was supposed to be sent from the island to Rome. He sent one-third to the capital, and sold the other two-thirds for his own benefit. He ground the tax-gatherers, who were of course tax-farmers, and the latter beat and starved the landholders till they paid the uttermost measure they possessed. Whole cities were laid under contribution in this way, and the islands near Sicily did not escape. In three years, according to Cicero, he stole about thirty-six millions of sestertii, appropriated for buying corn over and above that yielded by the tribute, and the sum is equal to about two hundred and thirty thousand pounds sterling. It would not be despised even by a modern political swindler, and money was worth far more then than now. For Verres, however, it was only an item; the whole amount of his vast robberies cannot well be guessed, much less correctly calculated, either from Cicero’s statements or from other sources. It may have amounted to a million of pounds sterling, or to much more, if the value of works of art be taken into consideration. Mark Antony is said to have squandered eight hundred millions of pounds sterling in his fifty-three years of life, but at one time he disposed of Italy and Asia Minor.
What is most astonishing is that, when Verres’ third term of office was over, nothing was done, and his successor was appointed without comment. The Romans were not easily moved to compassion by the wrongs of those subject to them, Sicily was full of slaves, and Rome had only lately crushed out the great rebellion of Spartacus in the south of Italy. In Capua, the luxurious capital of pleasure-loving Campania, one Lentulus Batiatus had a company of Gallic and Thracian gladiators, among whom was Spartacus, himself a Thracian of great strength, courage, and military talent, and possessing a sort of dignified superiority hardly to have been expected in one who had been born a shepherd and had turned highwayman in his own country. A faithful woman loved him and shared his life, and perhaps his death; and she had the gift of divination, and prophesied that he should become very great and terrible and have a happy end; which things came true, for he was the terror of the Romans and he died in ba
ttle. The whole company of gladiators numbered two hundred, and they conspired to escape from their bondage, but only seventy-eight of them succeeded. These seized upon the iron spits and carving-knives and whittles which they found in a cook’s shop, and marched out of Capua in broad daylight, for they were all trained fighters, and very strong men, and it was better not to hinder them. They met upon the road certain waggons, laden with gladiators’ weapons, the same perhaps that were to have been used by themselves in the coming show. Having armed themselves, they marched southward and took possession of the crater of Vesuvius, then extinct and overgrown with grass and wild vines. The place was almost impregnable, and when three thousand Roman soldiers attacked it on the most accessible side, the gladiators climbed down on the other, came round the crater, and fell upon their assailants in the rear, putting them to shameful flight and getting possession of their weapons. Spartacus was the leader of the band. He proclaimed all slaves to be free, and in an incredibly short space of time he was ravaging all Southern Italy at the head of forty thousand desperate men. In the next year he had seventy thousand, then a hundred thousand, and he thought of attacking Rome itself. He defeated one consular army after another, made many captives, and forced the Romans to fight as gladiators for his amusement, as he had once fought for theirs. His plan was to lead his army out of Italy in the end, and either to plunder other countries or to return to his home. But his men loved the south, as almost all fighting men have loved it, and in the south he met his death at last. When it came to the end he was opposed to Crassus in a great battle, and before it began he slew his horse in the sight of his men, saying that if he won the day he should have horses enough, but that if he lost it he should need none. He lost the day, and died, and they traced his last charge by the heaps of the slain, but no one could find what was left of his body. Then the Romans impaled six thousand of his men upon stakes along the Appian way. And these things took place while Verres was governor of Sicily, besides much more that had the interest of life and death for the Roman people.
Complete Works of F Marion Crawford Page 1425
