Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Verres was supported by some of the most powerful families at Rome.
There were laws against defrauders of the revenue; laws against debasing the coin; laws against sacrilege; laws against corrupt State contracts; laws against bribery at elections. Finally, there was a law, carefully framed, De repetundis, to exact retribution from proconsuls or propraetors of the type of Verres who had plundered the provinces.
The witnesses were examined during nine days; then Hortensius, with hardly a struggle at a reply, gave way, and Verres stood condemned by his own verdict. When the trial was over, and Verres had consented to go into exile, and to pay whatever fine was demanded, the "perpetua oratio" which Cicero thought good to make on the matter was published to the world.
The granite solidity of such and such a celebrated prose is nothing but the accumulation effected by the tyrant. Tyranny constrains the writer to conditions of diameter which are augmentations of force. The Ciceronian period, which hardly sufficed for Verres, would be blunted on Caligula. The less spread of sail in the phrase, the more intensity in the blow. Tacitus thinks with all his might.
Sometimes the evil was imputed to the degeneracy of the national character. Luxury and cupidity, it was said, had produced in our country the same effect which they had produced of old in the Roman republic. The modern Englishman was to the Englishman of the sixteenth century what Verres and Curio were to Dentatus and Fabricius.
We remember how Verres calculated that he could divide his spoil into three sufficient parts one for the lawyers, one for the judges, so as to insure his acquittal, and then one for himself. This plundering was common so common as to have become almost a matter of course; but it was illegal, and subjected some unfortunate culprits to exile, and to the disgorging of a part of what they had taken.
So Verres got his Mercury. We have a curious picture of the man as he made his progresses from town to town in his search for treasures of art. "As soon as it was spring and he knew that it was spring not from the rising of any constellation or the blowing of any wind, but simply because he saw the roses then indeed he bestirred himself.
Therefore it was that he dared to defy his own brethren, and to make the acquittal of Verres an impossibility. I should be inclined to think that the day on which Hortensius threw up the sponge, and Verres submitted to banishment and fine, was the happiest in the orator's life. Verres was made to pay a fine which was very insufficient for his crimes, and then to retire into comfortable exile.
Such a trial was called "Divinatio," because the judges had to get their lights in the matter as best they could without the assistance of witnesses by some process of divination with the aid of the gods, as it might be. Cicero's first speech in the matter of Verres is called In Quintum Cæcilium Divinatio, because one Cæcilius came forward to take the case away from him.
These latter, by a singularly just retribution, proved his ruin in the end. After the death of Cicero, Antony permitted the exiles to return. Verres came with them, bringing back his treasures of art, and was put to death because they excited the cupidity of the masters of Rome. There were various courts at Rome for persons accused of various crimes.
Word Of The Day