The Historians' History of the World 05

THE CAREER OF VERRES

About the period of Sulla’s abdication, a young noble named Caius Verres accompanied the prætor Dolabella to his government of Cilicia (80). At Sicyon in Achaia, he chose to demand a sum of money of the chief magistrate of the city, and being refused, shut him up in a close chamber with a fire of green wood, to extort the gratuity he required. From the same place he carried off several of the finest statues and paintings. At Athens he shared with his chief the plunder of the temple of Minerva, at Delos that of Apollo; at Chios, Erythræ, Halicarnassus, and elsewhere on the line of his route, he perpetrated similar acts of rapine. Samos possessed a temple venerated throughout Asia; Verres rifled both the temple and the city itself. The Samians complained to the governor of Asia; they were recommended to carry their complaints to Rome. Perga boasted a statue of Diana, coated with gold; Verres scraped off the gilding. Miletus offered him the escort of one of her finest ships; he detained it for his own use and sold it. At Lampsacus he sought to dishonour the daughter of the first citizen of the place; her father and brother ventured to defend her: one of his attendants was slain. Verres seized the pretext to accuse them both of an attempt on his life, and the Roman governor of the province obliged him by cutting off the heads of both. Such were the atrocities of the young ruffian, while yet a mere dependent of the proconsul, with no charge or office of his own. Being appointed quæstor he extended his exactions over every district of the province, and speedily amassed, by the avowal of his own principal, from two to three million sesterces [about £24,000, or $120,000] beyond the requisitions of the public service.

[75-72 B.C.]

Verres could now pay for his election to the prætorship in the city. For one year he dispensed his favourable judgments to wealthy suitors at home, and on its termination sailed for the province of Sicily. Here his conduct on the tribunal was marked by the most glaring venality. He sold everything, both his patronage and his decisions, making sport of the laws of the country and of his own edicts, of the religion, the fortunes, and the lives of the provincials. During the three years of his government, not a single senator of the sixty-five cities of the island was elected without a gratuity to the proprætor. He imposed arbitrary requisitions of many hundred thousand bushels of grain upon the communities already overburdened with their authorised tithes. He distributed cities among his favourites with the air of a Persian despot; Lipara he gave to a boon companion, Segesta to an actress, Herbita to a courtesan. These exactions rapidly depopulated the country. At the period of his arrival, the territory of Leontium possessed eighty-three farms; in the third year of the Verrine administration only thirty-two remained in occupation. At Motya the number of tenanted estates had fallen from 188 to 101, at Herbita from 257 to 120, at Argyrona from 250 to 80. Throughout the province more than one-half of the cultivated lands were abandoned by their miserable owners, as if the scourge of war or pestilence had passed over the island.

But Verres was an amateur and an antiquary, and had a taste for art as well as a thirst for lucre. At every city where he stopped on his progresses he extorted gems, vases, and trinkets from his hosts, or from any inhabitant whom he understood to possess them. No one ventured to complain; there was no redress even for a potentate in alliance with the republic, such as Antiochus, king of Syria, who was thus robbed of a splendid candelabrum enriched with jewels, which he was about to dedicate in the Capitol of Rome. All these objects of art were sent off to Italy to decorate the villa of the proprætor; nor were the antiques and curiosities he amassed less valuable than the ornaments of gold and silver. Finally Verres laid his hands on certain statues of Ceres and Diana, the special objects of worship among the natives, who were only allowed the consolation of coming to offer them their sacrifices in his gardens.