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It seemed all the more necessary to remove them because they could have given inconvenient testimony as to the inefficient condition of the ships. The cruelty of Verres was indeed as conspicuous as his avarice. Of this, as of his other vices, it would not suit the purpose of this book to speak in detail. One conspicuous example will suffice.
The provincial governors were, as a class, corrupt, and Verres was as vile as any of them, but he was also brutal in his manners and natural instincts, rapacious, licentious, cruel, and fond of low companions.
Cicero was tied to the Sicilians, whom he called his clients, by acts of mutual kindness, and he now stood forth to avenge them with a good will. The friends of Verres tried to procure a Praevaricatio, or sham accusation, conducted by a friend of the defendant, but Cicero stopped this by his brilliant and withering invective on Caecilius, the unlucky candidate for this dishonourable office.
With the wealth which he had extorted or stolen he bought his way into the praetorship, probably with his father's help; he then became a senator, and was sent to govern Sicily a place which had already suffered, so the Senate said, from the malpractices of Lepidus, and needing, therefore, to be generously dealt with. Verres held his province for three years.
When Verres was Prætor at Rome the year before he was sent to Sicily it became his duty, or rather privilege, as he found it, to see that a certain temple of Castor in the city was given up in proper condition by the executors of a defunct citizen who had taken a contract for keeping it in repair.
After holding office for three years Verres came back to Rome. The people of Messana, his only friends in the islands, had built a merchantman for him, and he loaded it with his spoils. He came back with a light heart. He knew indeed that the Sicilians would impeach him. His wrong-doings had been too gross, too insolent, for him to escape altogether.
Yet it is possible, after all, that this loss to us is not so great as it might seem. Some of his best speeches, as we know those, for instance, against Verres and in defence of Milo were written in the closet, and never spoken at all; and most of the others were reshaped and polished for publication.
From this he returned to Rome when the Roman exiles were amnestied, and was shortly afterward murdered by Antony, as has been told before. The year after the trial of Verres was that of Cicero's Ædileship. We know but little of him in the performance of the duties of this office, but we may gather that he performed them to the satisfaction of the people.
And he took the Sappho from the Prytaneum, the work of Silanion! a thing of such beauty that no other man can have the like of it in his own private house; yet Verres has it a man hardly fit to carry such a work of art as a burden, not possess it as a treasure of his own.
Nor could there have been less at Athens, Olympia, or Delphi. Scaurus had all the public pictures of Sicyon transported to Rome. Verres plundered every temple and public building in Sicily. Thus Rome was possessed of the finest paintings of the world, without the slightest claim to the advancement of the art.
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