Imperium

“Take your time,” said Cicero.
“I thought Verres might like to bathe after his journey, and then we could dine-but no, he said he wanted to see my collection straightaway.”
“You had some very fine pieces, I remember.”
“It was my life, senator, I cannot put it plainer. Thirty years spent traveling and haggling. Corinthian and Delian bronzes, pictures, silver-nothing I did not handle and choose myself. I had Myron’s The Discus Thrower, and The Spear Bearer by Polycleitus. Some silver cups by Mentor. Verres was complimentary. He said it deserved a wider audience. He said it was good enough for public display. I paid no attention till we were having dinner on the terrace and I heard a noise from the inner courtyard. My steward told me a wagon drawn by oxen had arrived and Verres’s lictors were loading it with everything.”
Sthenius was silent again, and I could readily imagine the shame of it for such a proud man: his wife wailing, the household traumatized, the dusty outlines where the statues once stood. The only sound in the study was the tap of my stylus on wax.
Cicero said: “You did not complain?”
“Who to? The governor?” Sthenius laughed. “No, senator. I was alive, wasn’t I? If he had just left it at that, I would have swallowed my losses, and you would never have heard a squeak from me. But collecting can be a sickness, and I tell you what: your Governor Verres has it badly. You remember those statues in the town square?”
“Indeed I do. Three very fine bronzes. But you are surely not telling me he stole those as well?”
“He tried. This was on his third day under my roof. He asked me whose they were. I told him they were the property of the town and had been for centuries. You know they are four hundred years old? He said he would like permission to remove them to his residence in Syracuse, also as a loan, and asked me to approach the council. By then I knew what kind of a man he was, so I said I could not, in all honor, oblige him. He left that night. A few days after that, I received a summons for trial on the fifth day of October, on a charge of forgery.”
“Who brought the charge?”
“An enemy of mine named Agathinus. He is a client of Verres himself. My first thought was to face him down. I have nothing to fear as far as my honesty goes. I have never forged a document in my life. But then I heard the judge was to be Verres, and that he had already fixed on the punishment. I was to be whipped in front of the whole town for my insolence.”
“And so you fled?”
“That same night, I took a boat along the coast to Messana.”
Cicero rested his chin in his hand and contemplated Sthenius. I recognized that gesture. He was weighing up the witness. “You say the hearing was on the fifth of last month. Have you heard what happened?”
“That is why I am here. I was convicted in my absence, sentenced to be flogged-and fined five thousand. But there is worse than that. At the hearing, Verres claimed fresh evidence had been produced against me, this time of spying for the rebels in Spain. There is to be a new trial in Syracuse on the first day of December.”
“But spying is a capital offense.”
“Senator-believe me-he plans to have me crucified. He boasts of it openly. I would not be the first, either. I need help. Please. Will you help me?”
I thought he might be about to sink to his knees and start kissing the senator’s feet, and so, I suspect, did Cicero, for he quickly got up from his chair and started pacing about the room. “It seems to me there are two aspects to this case, Sthenius. One, the theft of your property-and there, frankly, I cannot see what is to be done. Why do you think men such as Verres desire to be governors in the first place? Because they know they can take what they want, within reason. The second aspect, the manipulation of the legal process-that is more promising.
“I know several men with great legal expertise who live in Sicily -one, indeed, in Syracuse. I shall write to him today and urge him, as a particular favor to me, to accept your case. I shall even give him my opinion as to what he should do. He should apply to the court to have the forthcoming prosecution declared invalid, on the grounds that you are not present to answer. If that fails, and Verres goes ahead, your advocate should come to Rome and argue that the conviction is unsound.”
But the Sicilian was shaking his head. “If it was just a lawyer in Syracuse I needed, senator, I would not have come all the way to Rome.”
I could see Cicero did not like where this was leading. Such a case could tie up his practice for days, and Sicilians, as I had reminded him, did not have votes. Pro bono indeed!
“Listen,” he said reassuringly, “your case is strong. Verres is obviously corrupt. He abuses hospitality. He steals. He brings false charges. He plots judicial murder. His position is indefensible. It can easily be handled by an advocate in Syracuse -really, I promise you. Now, if you will excuse me, I have many clients to see, and I am due in court in less than an hour.”
He nodded to me, and I stepped forward, putting a hand on Sthenius’s arm to guide him out. The Sicilian shook it off. “But I need you,” he persisted.
“Why?”
“Because my only hope of justice lies here, not in Sicily, where Verres controls the courts. And everyone here tells me Marcus Cicero is the second-best lawyer in Rome.”
“Do they indeed?” Cicero ’s tone took on an edge of sarcasm: he hated that epithet. “Well then, why settle for second best? Why not go straight to Hortensius?”
“I thought of that,” said his visitor, artlessly, “but he turned me down. He is representing Verres.”
I SHOWED THE SICILIAN out and returned to find Cicero alone in his study, tilted back in his chair, tossing the leather ball from one hand to the other. Legal textbooks cluttered his desk. Precedents in Pleading by Hostilius was one which he had open; Manilius’s Conditions of Sale was another.
“Do you remember that red-haired drunk on the quayside at Puteoli, the day we came back from Sicily? ‘Ooooh! My good fellow! He’s returning from his province…’”
I nodded.
“That was Verres.” The ball went back and forth, back and forth. “The fellow gives corruption a bad name.”
“I am surprised at Hortensius for getting involved with him.”
“Are you? I am not.” He stopped tossing the ball and contemplated it on his outstretched palm. “The Dancing Master and the Boar…” He brooded for a while. “A man in my position would have to be mad to tangle with Hortensius and Verres combined, and all for the sake of some Sicilian who is not even a Roman citizen.”
“True.”
“True,” he repeated, although there was an odd hesitancy in the way he said it which sometimes makes me wonder if he had not just then glimpsed the whole thing-the whole extraordinary set of possibilities and consequences, laid out like a mosaic in his mind. But if he had, I never knew, for at that moment his daughter, Tullia, ran in, still wearing her nightdress, with some childish drawing to show him, and suddenly his attention switched entirely onto her-scooping her up and settling her on his knee. “Did you do this? Did you really do this all by yourself…?”
I left him to it and slipped away, back into the tablinum, to announce that we were running late and that the senator was about to leave for court. Sthenius was still moping around and asked me when he could expect an answer, to which I could only reply that he would have to fall in with the rest. Soon after that, Cicero himself appeared, hand in hand with Tullia, nodding good morning to everyone, greeting each by name (“the first rule in politics, Tiro: never forget a face”). He was beautifully turned out, as always, his hair pomaded and slicked back, his skin scented, his toga freshly laundered, his red leather shoes spotless and shiny, his face bronzed by years of pleading in the open air; groomed, lean, fit: he glowed. They followed him into the vestibule, where he hoisted the beaming little girl into the air, showed her off to the assembled company, then turned her face to his and gave her a resounding kiss on the lips. There was a drawn-out “Ahh!” and some isolated applause. It was not wholly put on for show-he would have done it even if no one had been present, for he loved his darling Tulliola more than he ever loved anyone in his entire life-but he knew the Roman electorate were a sentimental lot, and that if word of his paternal devotion got around, it would do him no harm.