The trial of Verres was a political as well as a judicial cause. From the tribunate of the Gracchi (B. C. 133-123), when the judicia were transferred to the equites, to the dictatorship of Sulla (B. C. 81-79), who restored them to the senate, there had been an eager contest at Rome for the judicial power. The equites and the senators had proved equally corrupt, and the Marian party, supported by the Italians and the provincials, clamoured loudly for a reform of the courts. Verres was a criminal whose condemnation might justify Sulla's law, whose acquittal would prove the unfitness of the senate for the judicial office. Cicero, accordingly, in his introductory speech. ( Verrin. i.), puts "this alternative prominently forward." In Verres's condemnation, he urges upon the senatorian bench of judices, "lies your order's safety; in his acquittal, your degradation now and henceforward." This rather than the weight of evidence adduced was the à priori ground for Verres's condemnation. The defendant himself had neither previous reputation nor ancestral honours to recommend him. At first, guilty compliance, and afterwards unblushing corruption, had been his steps to preferment. He was supported by the Metelli, the Scipios, and Hortensius, because their interests were accidentally involved with his. But the reasons which detract from the individual importance of Verres add historical value to the impeachment. Verres was the representative of the grosser elements of a revolutionary era, as Catiline was of its periodical crimes and turbulence. And with every allowance for exaggeration on Cicero's part, Verres was a type of Roman provincial governors, and, as such, his career forms no unimportant chapter in the annals of the expiring commonwealth.

Cicero had been Lilybaean quaestor in Sicily in B. C. 75, and on his departure from that island had promised his good offices to the Sicilians, whenever they might demand them. They committed to him the prosecution of Verres. For a rising advocate at the bar, depending on his own exertions alone for preferment, the opportunity was critical, whether for advancement or defeat. On the one hand, Cicero's attack on the aristocracy would win for him the equites and the people ; on the other, it closed upon him an effective source of patronage, and involved him with a party which he deserted on the first occasion. He seems, however, without scruple to have redeemed his promise to the Sicilians, and to have heartily entered into their cause. The Verrine trial is one of the three eras of Cicero's life, and perhaps that in which his cause was best, and his motives were most pure. He may have amplified the vices of Verres; he could scarcely exaggerate the faults of the provincial government of Rome. In the conduct of the prosecution, he infringed upon no law : on obtaining his verdict, he displayed no offensive vanity. In Catiline and Antonius, he was opposed to political rivals : in Verres, he encountered the enemy of the law, of social and domestic sanctities, of the faith of compacts, and the security of life and property. Neither during his administration, nor after his return to Rome, had Verres neglected to enlist for himself staunch and numerous supporters. With some, a bribe in its crudest form sufficed; but in many cases it was accompanied with some choice production of the chisel, the easel, or the loom. But his services were most in demand when his partisans in their official characters exhibited games in the forum. Hortensius and the Metelli were thus enabled to exhibit, for the first time, to a Roman mob many of the most exquisite specimens of Mentor, Myron, and Polycleitus, collected from nearly every province from the foot of Mount Taurus to the Lilybaean promontory. The practice of borrowing works of art from the provincials with which to adorn the capital on festivals, was not indeed peculiar to Verres or his age. But neither the refined Cornelii nor the rude Mummii had, when the occasion ended, adorned their own villas with these treasures, or distributed them among the galleries of their friends and adherents.

Meanwhile, neither threats nor offers were spared. Hortensius and Verres at Rome, and M. Metellus, the successor of Verres in Sicily, alternately flattered and bullied the deputies of that island, and Cicero more than once insinuates that money was indirectly offered to himself. The prosecutors, however, had nothing further to lose, and were desperate; Cicero had reputation to win, and was firm. Upon this, Hortensius changed his tactics. The impeachment could not be stopped entirely; but it might be parried. Q. Caecilius Niger had been quaestor to the defendant, had quarrelled with him, and had the means of exposing officially his abuse of the public money. To this prosecutor, said Hortensius, we do not object; he is seeking redress; but Cicero, notoriety. But the Sicilians rejected Caecilius altogether, not merely as no match for Hortensius, but as foisted into the cause by the defendant or his advocate. By a technical process of the Roman law, called Divinatio, the judices, without hearing evidence, determined from the arguments of counsel alone, who should be appointed prosecutor. They decided in Cicero's favour. Of all the Verrine orations, the Divinatio in Q. Caecilium is the most argumentative, and the most in accordance with modern practice. The orator demonstrates that the Sicilians rejected Caecilius, and demanded himself : that a volunteer accuser is as objectionable as a volunteer witness : that Caecilius cannot come into court with clean hands, since, as quaestor, he must officially have been cognizant of the peculations of his principal : and that his quarrel with Verres -- the ground of his alleged fitness for prosecutor -- was all a pretence. [NIGER, Q. CAECILIUS.]

The pretensions of Caecilius were thus set aside. Yet hope did not yet forsake Verres and his friends. Evidence for the prosecution was to be collected in Sicily itself. Cicero was allowed 110 days for the purpose. Verres once again attempted to set up a sham prosecutor, who undertook to impeach him for his former extortions in Achaia, and to gather the evidence in 108 days. Had this been really done, the effect would have been, that the false impeachment would have taken precedence, and the Sicilian cause either been referred to a packed bench, or indefinitely adjourned. But the new prosecutor--one Piso or Damianus--never went even so far as Brundisium in quest of evidence, and the design was abandoned. (Verrin. 1.2 ; Schol. Gronov. p. 388, Orelli; 2.1, 11; Pseud. Ascon. p. 165, ib.) Instead of the 110 days allowed, Cicero, assisted by his cousin Lucius, completed his researches in 50, and returned with a mass of evidence and a crowd of witnesses gathered from all parts of the island, from the rich and the poor, the agriculturist and the artisan, in differently. At Syracuse and Messana alone did Cicero meet with reluctance or opposition. At the former city he completely overcame Verres's partisans, carried away with him a huge budget of vouchers and documents, and procured the erasure from the public register of an honorary decree, which had been extorted by Verres from the Syracusans. At Messana he was less successful. That city had, comparatively, been favoured by the ex-praetor. Here also Cicero encountered his old enemy Caecilius Niger, and the praetor L. Metellus, an alleged kinsman of Verres. The praetor forbade the Messanese to aid or harbour the orator or his suite : reproached him for tampering with Greeks, and addressing them in their own tongue ; and threatened to seize the documents he brought with him. Cicero, however, eluded the praetor and all attempts of Verres to obstruct his return, and reached the capital nearly two months before either friends or opponents expected him.

Hortensius now grasped at his last chance of an acquittal, and it was not an unlikely one. Could the impeachment be put off to the next year, Verres was safe. Hortensius himself would then be consul, with Q. Metellus for his colleague, M. Metellus would be city-praetor, and L. Metellus was already praetor in Sicily. For every firm and honest judex whom the upright M. Acilius Glabrio [No. 5], then city praetor, had named, a partial or venal substitute would be found. Glabrio himself would give place as quaesitor or president of the court to M. Metellus, a partisan, if not a kinsman of the defendant; public curiosity would cool; the witnesses be frightened or conciliated ; and time be allowed for forging and organising a chain of counter-depositions. It was already the month of July. The games to be exhibited by Cn. Pompey were fixed for the middle of August, and would occupy a fortnight; the Roman games would immediately succeed them, and thus forty days intervene between Cicero's charge and the reply of Hortensius, who again, by dexterous adjournments, would delay the proceedings until the games of Victory, and the commencement of the new year. Cicero therefore abandoned all thought of eloquence or display, and merely introducing his case in the first of the Verrine orations, rested all his hopes of success on the weight of testimony alone. The "king of the Forum," -- so Hortensius was called -- was disarmed. His histrionic arts of dress, intonation, pathos, and invective, found no place in dry cross-examinations. He was quite unprepared with counter-evidence, and after the first day, when he put a few petulant questions, and offered some trivial objections to the course pursued, he abandoned the cause of Verres. Before the nine days occupied in hearing evidence were over, the defendant was on his road to Marseilles. The impeachment of Verres presented a scene for the historian and the artist. The judices met in the temple of Castor-already signalised by one of the defendant's most fraudulent acts ( Verrin. 2.1, 49, ff.). They were surrounded by the senate, whose retention of the judicia depended on their verdict. They were watched by the equites, whose recovery of the judicia rested on the same issue. But neither the senate nor the equites were probably the most anxious spectators of the proceedings. The range of the defendant's extortions had been so wide, that the witnesses alone formed no inconsiderable portion of the audience. From the foot of Mount Taurus, from the shores of the Black Sea, from many cities of the Grecian mainland, from many islands of the Aegean, from every city and market-town of Sicily, deputations thronged to Rome. In the porticoes and on the steps of the temple, in the area of the Forum, in the colonnades that surrounded it, on the house-tops and on the overlooking declivities, were stationed dense and eager crowds of impoverished heirs and their guardians, bankrupt publicani and cornmerchants, fathers bewailing their children carried off to the praetor's harem, children mourning for their parents dead in the praetor's dungeons, Greek nobles whose descent was traced to Cecrops or Eurysthenes or to the great Ionian and Minyan houses, and Phoenicians whose ancestors had been priests of the Tyrian Melcarth, or claimed kindred with the Zidonian Iah. " All these and more came flocking," and the casual multitude was swelled by thousands of spectators from Italy partly attracted by the approaching games, and partly by curiosity to behold a criminal who had scourged and crucified Roman citizens, who had respected neither local nor national shrines, and who boasted that wealth would even yet rescue the murderer, the violator, and the temple-robber from the laws of man and from the nemesis of the Gods. The provincials scrupled not to avow that if Verres were acquitted, they would petition the senate to rescind at once the laws against malversation, that so for the time to come provincial governors might plunder, merely to enrich themselves, and not also to provide the means of averting penalties which were never enforced.

The fact that of the seven Verrine orations--for the belongs to them -- two only, the and the were spoken, while the remaining five were compiled from the depositions after the verdict, may seem at first sight to detract from their oratorical if not from their literary value. But so perfectly has Cicero imparted to the entire series the semblance of delivery, and so rarely did the orators of antiquity pronounce extempore speeches, that we probably lose little by the course which necessity imposed on the orator. For while following the various moods and evolutions of this great impeachment, it seems almost impossible to believe that Verres was not actually writhing beneath the scourge, that Hortensius was not listening in impotent dismay, that the judices were not hurried along by the burning words and the glowing pictures of vice, ignominy, and crime, that the senate was not panic-struck, that the equites and the plebs were not hailing the dawn of retribution, and that the provincials were not gazing in fear and wrath upon the panorama of malversation exhibited by Cicero. In the Catilinarian orations the invective is perhaps more condensed, and the tone of the speech more strictly forensic : in the Philippics the assault is deadlier since the struggle was internecine. But in neither does the imagination of the orator embrace so wide a range of topics, expatiate so genially on whatever was collateral to the cause, or wield with such absolute sway the powers of language and rhetoric as in the Verrine orations. It is almost needless to point out instances of satire, invective, argument, and description which have ever since furnished works of rhetoric with examples and the practical orator with studies in his art. A few of the most striking in each kind may be ranged under the following heads.