PUBLIC CAREER.--IMPEACHMENT OF VERRES.
Increasing reputation as a brilliant and successful pleader, and the
social influence which this brought with it, secured the rapid succession
of Cicero to the highest public offices. Soon after his marriage he was
elected Quaestor--the first step on the official ladder--which, as he
already possessed the necessary property qualification, gave him a seat in
the Senate for life. The Aedileship and Praetorship followed subsequently,
each as early, in point of age, as it could legally be held.[1] His
practice as an advocate suffered no interruption, except that his
Quaestorship involved his spending a year in Sicily. The Praetor who
was appointed to the government of that province[2] had under him two
quaestors, who were a kind of comptrollers of the exchequer; and Cicero
was appointed to the western district, having his headquarters at
Lilybaeum. In the administration of his office there he showed himself a
thorough man of business. There was a dearth of corn at Rome that year,
and Sicily was the great granary of the empire. The energetic measures
which the new Quaestor took fully met the emergency. He was liberal to
the tenants of the State, courteous and accessible to all, upright in his
administration, and, above all, he kept his hands clean from bribes and
peculation. The provincials were as much astonished as delighted: for Rome
was not in the habit of sending them such officers. They invented honours
for him such as had never been bestowed on any minister before.
[Footnote 1: The Quaestors (of whom there were at this time twenty) acted
under the Senate as State treasurers. The Consul or other officer who
commanded in chief during a campaign would be accompanied by one of them
as paymaster-general.
The Aediles, who were four in number, had the care of all public
buildings, markets, roads, and the State property generally. They had also
the superintendence of the national festivals and public games.
The duties of the Praetors, of whom there were eight, were principally
judicial. The two seniors, called the 'City' and 'Foreign' respectively,
corresponded roughly to our Home and Foreign Secretaries. These were all
gradual steps to the office of Consul.]
[Footnote 2: The provinces of Rome, in their relation to the mother-state
of Italy, may be best compared with our own government of India, or such
of our crown colonies as have no representative assembly. They had each
their governor or lieutenant-governor, who must have been an ex-minister
of Rome: a man who had been Consul went out with the rank of
"pro-consul",--one who had been Praetor with the rank of "pro-praetor".
These held office for one or two years, and had the power of life and
death within their respective jurisdictions. They had under them one or
more officers who bore the title of Quaestor, who collected the taxes and
had the general management of the revenues of the province. The provinces
at this time were Sicily, Sardinia with Corsica, Spain and Gaul (each in
two divisions); Greece, divided into Macedonia and Achaia (the Morea);
Asia, Syria, Cilicia, Bithynia, Cyprus, and Africa in four divisions.
Others were added afterwards, under the Empire.]
No wonder the young official's head (he was not much over thirty)
was somewhat turned. "I thought", he said, in one of his speeches
afterwards--introducing with a quiet humour, and with all a practised
orator's skill, one of those personal anecdotes which relieve a long
speech--"I thought in my heart, at the time, that the people at Rome must
be talking of nothing but my quaestorship". And he goes on to tell his
audience how he was undeceived.
"The people of Sicily had devised for me unprecedented honours. So I left
the island in a state of great elation, thinking that the Roman people
would at once offer me everything without my seeking. But when I was
leaving my province, and on my road home, I happened to land at Puteoli
just at the time when a good many of our most fashionable people are
accustomed to resort to that neighbourhood. I very nearly collapsed,
gentlemen, when a man asked me what day I had left Rome, and whether there
was any news stirring? When I made answer that I was returning from my
province--'Oh! yes, to be sure', said he; 'Africa, I believe?' 'No', said
I to him, considerably annoyed and disgusted; 'from Sicily'. Then somebody
else, with the air of a man who knew all about it, said to him--'What!
don't you know that he was Quaestor at _Syracuse_?' [It was at
Lilybaeum--quite a different district.] No need to make a long story of
it; I swallowed my indignation, and made as though I, like the rest, had
come there for the waters. But I am not sure, gentlemen, whether that
scene did not do me more good than if everybody then and there had
publicly congratulated me. For after I had thus found out that the people
of Rome have somewhat deaf ears, but very keen and sharp eyes, I left off
cogitating what people would hear about me; I took care that thenceforth
they should see me before them every day: I lived in their sight, I stuck
close to the Forum; the porter at my gate refused no man admittance--my
very sleep was never allowed to be a plea against an audience".[1]
[Footnote 1: Defence of Plancius, c. 26, 27.]
Did we not say that Cicero was modern, not ancient? Have we not here the
original of that Cambridge senior wrangler, who, happening to enter a
London theatre at the same moment with the king, bowed all round with a
gratified embarrassment, thinking that the audience rose and cheered at
_him_?
It was while he held the office of Aedile that he made his first
appearance as public prosecutor, and brought to justice the most important
criminal of the day. Verres, late Praetor in Sicily, was charged with
high crimes and misdemeanours in his government. The grand scale of his
offences, and the absorbing interest of the trial, have led to his case
being quoted as an obvious parallel to that of Warren Hastings, though
with much injustice to the latter, so far as it may seem to imply any
comparison of moral character. This Verres, the corrupt son of a corrupt
father, had during his three years' rule heaped on the unhappy province
every evil which tyranny and rapacity could inflict. He had found it
prosperous and contented: he left it exhausted and smarting under its
wrongs. He met his impeachment now with considerable confidence. The gains
of his first year of office were sufficient, he said, for himself; the
second had been for his friends; the third produced more than enough to
bribe a jury.
The trials at Rome took place in the Forum--the open space, of nearly five
acres, lying between the Capitoline and Palatine hills. It was the city
market-place, but it was also the place where the population assembled for
any public meeting, political or other--where the idle citizen strolled
to meet his friends and hear the gossip of the day, and where the man
of business made his appointments. Courts for the administration of
justice--magnificent halls, called _basilicae_--had by this time been
erected on the north and south sides, and in these the ordinary trials
took place; but for state trials the open Forum was itself the court. One
end of the wide area was raised on a somewhat higher level--a kind of daïs
on a large scale--and was separated from the rest by the Rostra, a sort of
stage from which the orators spoke. It was here that the trials were held.
A temporary tribunal for the presiding officer, with accommodation for
counsel, witnesses, and jury, was erected in the open air; and the scene
may perhaps best be pictured by imagining the principal square in
some large town fitted up with open hustings on a large scale for an
old-fashioned county election, by no means omitting the intense popular
excitement and mob violence appropriate to such occasions. Temples of the
gods and other public buildings overlooked the area, and the steps of
these, on any occasion of great excitement, would be crowded by those who
were anxious to see at least, if they could not hear.
Verres, as a state criminal, would be tried before a special commission,
and by a jury composed at this time entirely from the senatorial order,
chosen by lot (with a limited right of challenge reserved to both parties)
from a panel made out every year by the praetor. This magistrate, who
was a kind of minister of justice, usually presided on such occasions,
occupying the curule chair, which was one of the well-known privileges of
high office at Rome. But his office was rather that of the modern chairman
who keeps order at a public meeting than that of a judge. Judge, in our
sense of the word, there was none; the jury were the judges both of law
and fact. They were, in short, the recognised assessors of the praetor, in
whose hands the administration of justice was supposed to lie. The law,
too, was of a highly flexible character, and the appeals of the advocates
were rather to the passions and feelings of the jurors than to the legal
points of the case. Cicero himself attached comparatively little weight
to this branch of his profession;--"Busy as I am", he says in one of his
speeches, "I could make myself lawyer enough in three days". The jurors
gave each their vote by ballot,--'guilty', 'not guilty', or (as in the
Scotch courts) 'not proven',--and the majority carried the verdict.
But such trials as that of Verres were much more like an impeachment
before the House of Commons than a calm judicial inquiry. The men who
would have to try a defendant of his class would be, in very few cases,
honest and impartial weighers of the evidence. Their large number (varying
from fifty to seventy) weakened the sense of individual responsibility,
and laid them more open to the appeal of the advocates to their political
passions. Most of them would come into court prejudiced in some degree
by the interests of party; many would be hot partisans. Cicero, in his
treatise on 'Oratory', explains clearly for the pleader's guidance the
nature of the tribunals to which he had to appeal. "Men are influenced
in their verdicts much more by prejudice or favour, or greed of gain,
or anger, or indignation, or pleasure, or hope or fear, or by
misapprehension, or by some excitement of their feelings, than either by
the facts of the case, or by established precedents, or by any rules or
principles whatever either of law or equity".
Verres was supported by some of the most powerful families at Rome.
Peculation on the part of governors of provinces had become almost a
recognised principle: many of those who held offices of state either had
done, or were waiting their turn to do, much the same as the present
defendant; and every effort had been made by his friends either to
put off the trial indefinitely, or to turn it into a sham by procuring
the appointment of a private friend and creature of his own as public
prosecutor. On the other hand, the Sicilian families, whom he had wronged
and outraged, had their share of influence also at Rome, and there was
a growing impatience of the insolence and rapacity of the old governing
houses, of whose worst qualities the ex-governor of Sicily was a fair
type. There were many reasons which would lead Cicero to take up such a
cause energetically. It was a great opening for him in what we may call
his profession: his former connection with the government of Sicily gave
him a personal interest in the cause of the province; and, above all, the
prosecution of a state offender of such importance was a lift at once into
the foremost ranks of political life. He spared no pains to get up his
case thoroughly. He went all over the island collecting evidence; and his
old popularity there did him good service in the work.
There was, indeed, evidence enough against the late governor. The reckless
gratification of his avarice and his passions had seldom satisfied him,
without the addition of some bitter insult to the sufferers. But there was
even a more atrocious feature in the case, of which Cicero did not fail to
make good use in his appeal to a Roman jury. Many of the unhappy victims
had the Roman franchise. The torture of an unfortunate Sicilian might be
turned into a jest by a clever advocate for the defence, and regarded by a
philosophic jury with less than the cold compassion with which we regard
the sufferings of the lower animals; but "to scourge a man that was a
Roman and uncondemned", even in the far-off province of Judea, was a
thought which, a century later, made the officers of the great Empire,
at its pitch of power, tremble before a wandering teacher who bore the
despised name of Christian. No one can possibly tell the tale so well as
Cicero himself; and the passage from his speech for the prosecution is an
admirable specimen both of his power of pathetic narrative and scathing
denunciation, "How shall I speak of Publius Gavius, a citizen of Consa?
With what powers of voice, with what force of language, with what
sufficient indignation of soul, can I tell the tale? Indignation, at
least, will not fail me: the more must I strive that in this my pleading
the other requisites may be made to meet the gravity of the subject, the
intensity of my feeling. For the accusation is such that, when it was
first laid before me, I did not think to make use of it; though I knew it
to be perfectly true, I did not think it would be credible.--How shall I
now proceed?--when I have already been speaking for so many hours on one
subject--his atrocious cruelty; when I have exhausted upon other points
well-nigh all the powers of language such as alone is suited to that man's
crimes;--when I have taken no precaution to secure your attention by any
variety in my charges against him,--in what fashion can I now speak on a
charge of this importance? I think there is one way--one course, and only
one, left for me to take. I will place the facts before you; and they have
in themselves such weight, that no eloquence--I will not say of mine, for
I have none--but of any man's, is needed to excite your feelings.
"This Gavius of Consa, of whom I speak, had been among the crowds of Roman
citizens who had been thrown into prison under that man. Somehow he had
made his escape out of the Quarries,[1] and had got to Messana; and when
he saw Italy and the towers of Rhegium now so close to him, and out of
the horror and shadow of death felt himself breathe with a new life as he
scented once more the fresh air of liberty and the laws, he began to talk
at Messana, and to complain that he, a Roman citizen, had been put in
irons--that he was going straight to Rome--that he would be ready there
for Verres on his arrival.
[Footnote 1: This was one of the state prisons at Syracuse, so called,
said to have been constructed by the tyrant Dionysius. They were the
quarries from which the stone was dug for building the city, and had been
converted to their present purpose. Cicero, who no doubt had seen the one
in question, describes it as sunk to an immense depth in the solid rock.
There was no roof; and the unhappy prisoners were exposed there "to the
sun by day and to the rain and frosts by night". In these places the
survivors of the unfortunate Athenian expedition against Syracuse were
confined, and died in great numbers.]
"The wretched man little knew that he might as well have talked in this
fashion in the governor's palace before his very face, as at Messana.
For, as I told you before, this city he had selected for himself as the
accomplice in his crimes, the receiver of his stolen goods, the confidant
of all his wickedness. So Gavius is brought at once before the city
magistrates; and, as it so chanced, on that very day Verres himself came
to Messana. The case is reported to him; that there is a certain Roman
citizen who complained of having been put into the Quarries at Syracuse;
that as he was just going on board ship, and was uttering threats--really
too atrocious--against Verres, they had detained him, and kept him in
custody, that the governor himself might decide about him as should seem
to him good. Verres thanks the gentlemen, and extols their goodwill and
zeal for his interests. He himself, burning with rage and malice, comes
down to the court. His eyes flashed fire; cruelty was written on every
line of his face. All present watched anxiously to see to what lengths he
meant to go, or what steps he would take; when suddenly he ordered the
prisoner to be dragged forth, and to be stripped and bound in the open
forum, and the rods to be got ready at once. The unhappy man cried out
that he was a Roman citizen--that he had the municipal franchise
of Consa--that he had served in a campaign with Lucius Pretius, a
distinguished Roman knight, now engaged in business at Panormus, from whom
Verres might ascertain the truth of his statement. Then that man replies
that he has discovered that he, Gavius, has been sent into Sicily as a
spy by the ringleaders of the runaway slaves; of which charge there was
neither witness nor trace of any kind, or even suspicion in any man's
mind. Then he ordered the man to be scourged severely all over his body.
Yes--a Roman citizen was cut to pieces with rods in the open forum at
Messana, gentlemen; and as the punishment went on, no word, no groan of
the wretched man, in all his anguish, was heard amid the sound of the
lashes, but this cry,--'I am a Roman citizen!' By such protest of
citizenship he thought he could at least save himself from anything like
blows--could escape the indignity of personal torture. But not only did he
fail in thus deprecating the insult of the lash, but when he redoubled
his entreaties and his appeal to the name of Rome, a cross--yes, I say, a
cross--was ordered for that most unfortunate and ill-fated man, who had
never yet beheld such an abuse of a governor's power.
"O name of liberty, sweet to our ears! O rights of citizenship, in which
we glory! O laws of Porcius and Sempronius! O privilege of the tribune,
long and sorely regretted, and at last restored to the people of Rome!
Has it all come to this, that a Roman citizen in a province of the Roman
people--in a federal town--is to be bound and beaten with rods in the
forum by a man who only holds those rods and axes--those awful emblems--by
grace of that same people of Rome? What shall I say of the fact that fire,
and red-hot plates, and other tortures were applied? Even if his agonised
entreaties and pitiable cries did not check you, were you not moved by the
tears and groans which burst from the Roman citizens who were present at
the scene? Did you dare to drag to the cross any man who claimed to be a
citizen of Rome?--I did not intend, gentlemen, in my former pleading, to
press this case so strongly--I did not indeed; for you saw yourselves
how the public feeling was already embittered against the defendant by
indignation, and hate, and dread of a common peril".
He then proceeds to prove by witnesses the facts of the case and the
falsehood of the charge against Gavius of having been a spy. "However", he
goes on to say, addressing himself now to Verres, "we will grant, if
you please, that your suspicions on this point, if false, were honestly
entertained".
"You did not know who the man was; you suspected him of being a spy. I do
not ask the grounds of your suspicion. I impeach you on your own evidence.
He said he was a Roman citizen. Had you yourself, Verres, been seized and
led out to execution, in Persia, say, or in the farthest Indies, what
other cry or protest could you raise but that you were a Roman citizen?
And if you, a stranger there among strangers, in the hands of barbarians,
amongst men who dwell in the farthest and remotest regions of the earth,
would have found protection in the name of your city, known and renowned
in every nation under heaven, could the victim whom you were dragging to
the cross, be he who he might--and you did not know who he was--when he
declared he was a citizen of Rome, could he obtain from you, a Roman
magistrate, by the mere mention and claim of citizenship, not only no
reprieve, but not even a brief respite from death?
"Men of neither rank nor wealth, of humble birth and station, sail the
seas; they touch at some spot they never saw before, where they are
neither personally known to those whom they visit, nor can always find
any to vouch for their nationality. But in this single fact of their
citizenship they feel they shall be safe, not only with our own governors,
who are held in check by the terror of the laws and of public opinion--not
only among those who share that citizenship of Rome, and who are
united with them by community of language, of laws, and of many things
besides--but go where they may, this, they think, will be their safe
guard. Take away this confidence, destroy this safeguard for our Roman
citizens--once establish the principle that there is no protection in the
words, 'I am a citizen of Rome'--that praetor or other magistrate may with
impunity sentence to what punishment he will a man who says he is a Roman
citizen, merely because somebody does not know it for a fact; and at
once, by admitting such a defence, you are shutting up against our
Roman citizens all our provinces, all foreign states, despotic or
independent--all the whole world, in short, which has ever lain open to
our national enterprise beyond all".
He turns again to Verres.
"But why talk of Gavius? as though it were Gavius on whom you were
wreaking a private vengeance, instead of rather waging war against the
very name and rights of Roman citizenship. You showed yourself an enemy,
I say, not to the individual man, but to the common cause of liberty. For
what meant it that, when the authorities of Messana, according to their
usual custom, would have erected the cross behind their city on the
Pompeian road, you ordered it to be set up on the side that looked toward
the Strait? Nay, and added this--which you cannot deny, which you said
openly in the hearing of all--that you chose that spot for this reason,
that as he had called himself a Roman citizen, he might be able, from his
cross of punishment, to see in the distance his country and his home! And
so, gentlemen, that cross was the only one, since Messana was a city, that
was ever erected on that spot. A point which commanded a view of Italy was
chosen by the defendant for the express reason that the dying sufferer, in
his last agony and torment, might see how the rights of the slave and the
freeman were separated by that narrow streak of sea; that Italy might
look upon a son of hers suffering the capital penalty reserved for slaves
alone.
"It is a crime to put a citizen of Rome in bonds; it is an atrocity to
scourge him; to put him to death is well-nigh parricide; what shall I say
it is to crucify him?--Language has no word by which I may designate such
an enormity. Yet with all this yon man was not content. 'Let him look',
said he, 'towards his country; let him die in full sight of freedom and
the laws'. It was not Gavius; it was not a single victim, unknown to fame,
a mere individual Roman citizen; it was the common cause of liberty,
the common rights of citizenship, which you there outraged and put to a
shameful death".
But in order to judge of the thrilling effect of such passages upon a
Roman jury, they must be read in the grand periods of the oration itself,
to which no translation into a language so different in idiom and rhythm
as English is from Latin can possibly do justice. The fruitless appeal
made by the unhappy citizen to the outraged majesty of Rome, and the
indignant demand for vengeance which the great orator founds upon
it--proclaiming the recognised principle that, in every quarter of the
world, the humblest wanderer who could say he was a Roman citizen should
find protection in the name--will be always remembered as having supplied
Lord Palmerston with one of his most telling illustrations. But this great
speech of Cicero's--perhaps the most magnificent piece of declamation in
any language--though written and preserved to us was never spoken. The
whole of the pleadings in the case, which extend to some length, were
composed for the occasion, no doubt, in substance, and we have to thank
Cicero for publishing them afterwards in full. But Verres only waited
to hear the brief opening speech of his prosecutor; he did not dare to
challenge a verdict, but allowing judgment to go by default, withdrew to
Marseilles soon after the trial opened. He lived there, undisturbed in the
enjoyment of his plunder, long enough to see the fall and assassination
of his great accuser, but only (as it is said) to share his fate soon
afterwards as one of the victims of Antony's proscription. Of his guilt
there can be no question; his fear to face a court in which he had many
friends is sufficient presumptive evidence of it; but we must hesitate in
assuming the deepness of its dye from the terrible invectives of Cicero.
No sensible person will form an opinion upon the real merits of a case,
even in an English court of justice now, entirely from the speech of the
counsel for the prosecution. And if we were to go back a century or two,
to the state trials of those days, we know that to form our estimate of a
prisoner's guilt from such data only would be doing him a gross injustice.
We have only to remember the exclamation of Warren Hastings himself, whose
trial, as has been said, has so many points of resemblance with that of
Verres, when Burke sat down after the torrent of eloquence which he had
hurled against the accused in his opening speech for the prosecution;--"I
thought myself for the moment", said Hastings, "the guiltiest man in
England".
The result of this trial was to raise Cicero at once to the leadership--if
so modern an expression may be used--of the Roman bar. Up to this time the
position had been held by Hortensius, the counsel for Verres, whom Cicero
himself calls "the king of the courts". He was eight years the senior of
Cicero in age, and many more professionally, for he is said to have made
his first public speech at nineteen. He had the advantage of the most
extraordinary memory, a musical voice, and a rich flow of language: but
Cicero more than implies that he was not above bribing a jury. It was not
more disgraceful in those days than bribing a voter in our own. The two
men were very unlike in one respect; Hortensius was a fop and an exquisite
(he is said to have brought an action against a colleague for disarranging
the folds of his gown), while Cicero's vanity was quite of another kind.
After Verres's trial, the two advocates were frequently engaged together
in the same cause and on the same side: but Hortensius seems quietly to
have abdicated his forensic sovereignty before the rising fame of his
younger rival. They became, ostensibly at least, personal friends. What
jealousy there was between them, strange to say, seems always to have been
on the side of Cicero, who could not be convinced of the friendly feeling
which, on Hortensius's part, there seems no reason to doubt. After his
rival's death, however, Cicero did full justice to his merits and his
eloquence, and even inscribed to his memory a treatise on 'Glory', which
has been lost.