So that I do not marvel at your having established a new law in the matter of the tenths you, a man so wise, so thoroughly practiced in praetorian edicts and censorian laws. I do not wonder, I say, at your having invented something; but I do blame you, I do impeach you, for having of your own accord, without any command from the people, without the authority of the senate, changed the laws of the province of Sicily.

The senate permitted Lucius Octavius and Caius Cotta, the consuls, to put up to auction at Rome the tenths of wine, and oil, and of pulse, which before your time the quaestors had been in the habit of putting up in Sicily; and to establish any law with respect to those articles which they might think fit. When the contract was offered for sale, the farmers begged them to add some clauses to the law, and yet not to depart from the other laws of the censors. A man opposed this, who by accident was at Rome at that time; your host,—your host, and intimate friend, I say, O Verres,—Sthenius, of Thermae, who is here present The consuls examined into the matter. When they had summoned many of the principal and most honourable men of the state to form a council on the subject; according to the opinion of that council they gave notice that they should put the tenths up to auction according to the law of Hiero.

Was it not so? Men of the greatest wisdom, invested with the supreme authority, to whom the senate had given the whole power of making laws respecting the letting out the farming of the tributes, (and this power had been ratified by the people, while only one Sicilian objected to it,) would not alter the name of the law of Hiero, even when the measure would have been accompanied by an augmentation of the revenue; but you, a man of no wisdom, of no authority, without any order from people or senate, while all Sicily objected, abrogated the whole law of Hiero, to the greatest injury and even destruction of the revenue.

But what law is this, O judges, which he amends, or rather totally abrogates? A law framed with the greatest acuteness and the greatest diligence, which gives up the cultivator of the land to the collector of the tenths, guarded by so many securities, that neither in the corn fields, nor on the threshing floors, nor in the barns, nor while removing his corn privately, nor while carrying it away openly, can the cultivator defraud the collector of one single grain without the severest punishment. The law has been framed with such care, that it is plain that a man framed it who had no other revenues; with such acuteness that it was plain that he was a Sicilian; with such severity, that he was evidently a tyrant: by this law, however, cultivating the land was an advantageous trade for the Sicilian; for the laws for the collectors of the tenths were also drawn up so carefully that it is not possible for more than the tenth to be extorted from the cultivator against his will.

And though all these things were settled in this way, after so many years and even ages, Verres was found not only to change, but entirely to overturn them, and to convert to purposes of his own most infamous profit those regulations which had long ago been instituted and established for the safety of the allies and the benefit of the republic. In the first instance he appointed certain men, collectors of the tenths in name, in reality the ministers and satellites of his desires; by whom I will show that the province was for three years so harassed and plundered, O judges, that it will take many years and a long series of wise and incorruptible governors to recover it.

The chief of all those who were called collectors, was Quintus Apronius, that man whom you see in court, concerning whose extraordinary wickedness you have heard the complaints of most influential deputations. Look, O judges, at the face and countenance of the man; and from that obstinacy which he retains now in the most desperate circumstances, you may imagine and recollect what his arrogance must have been in Sicily. This Apronius is the man whom Verres (though he had collected together the most infamous men from all quarters, and though he had taken with him no small number of men like himself in worthlessness, licentiousness, and audacity,) still considered most like himself of any man in the whole province. And so in a very short time they became intimate, not because of interest, nor of reason, nor of any introduction from mutual friends, but from the baseness and similarity of their pursuits.