Imperium

had received a thorough education, could you hope to stand the strain? We shall find out this morning. If you can reply to what I am now saying, if you can use one single expression that is not contained in some book of extracts compiled from other people’s speeches and given to you by your schoolteacher, then perhaps you will not be a failure at the actual trial.”
    He moved toward the center of the court and addressed the crowd in the Forum as well as the jury. “‘Well,’ you may say, ‘what if that is so? Do you then possess all these qualities yourself?’ Would that I did, indeed. Still, I have done my best, and worked hard from boyhood, in order to acquire them if I could. Everyone knows that my life has centered around the Forum and the law courts; that few men, if any, of my age have defended more cases; that all the time I can spare from the business of my friends I spend in the study and hard work which this profession demands, to make myself fitter and readier for forensic practice. Yet even I, when I think of the great day when the accused man is summoned to appear and I have to make my speech, am not only anxious, but tremble physically from head to foot. You, Caecilius, have no such fears, no such thoughts, no such anxieties. You imagine that, if you can learn by heart a phrase or two out of some old speech, like ‘I beseech almighty and most merciful God’ or ‘I could wish, gentlemen, had it only been possible,’ you will be excellently prepared for your entrance into court.
    “Caecilius, you are nothing, and you count for nothing. Hortensius will destroy you! But he will never crush me with his cleverness. He will never lead me astray by any display of ingenuity. He will never employ his great powers to weaken and dislodge me from my position.” He looked toward Hortensius and bowed to him in mock humility, to which Hortensius responded by standing and bowing back, eliciting more laughter. “I am well acquainted with all this gentleman’s methods of attack,” continued Cicero, “and all his oratorical devices. However capable he may be, he will feel, when he comes to speak against me, that the trial is among other things a trial of his own capacities. And I give this gentleman fair warning well beforehand, that if you decide that I am to conduct this case, he will have to make a radical change in his methods of defense. If I conduct the case, he will have no reason to think that the court can be bribed without serious danger to a large number of people.”
    The mention of bribery produced a brief uproar and brought the normally equable Hortensius to his feet, but Cicero waved him back into his place. On and on he went, his rhetoric hammering down upon his opponents like the ringing blows of a blacksmith. I shall not quote it all. The speech, which lasted at least an hour, is readily available for those who wish to read it. He smashed away at Verres for his corruption, and at Caecilius for his previous links with Verres, and at Hortensius for desiring a second-rate opponent. And he concluded by challenging the senators themselves, walking over to the jury and looking each of them in the eye. “It rests with you, then, gentlemen, to choose the man whom you think best qualified by good faith, industry, sagacity, and weight of character to maintain this great case before this great court. If you give Quintus Caecilius the preference over me, I shall not think I have been beaten by the better man. But Rome may think that an honorable, strict, and energetic prosecutor like myself was not what you desired, and not what senators would ever desire.” He paused, his gaze coming to rest at last on Catulus, who stared straight back at him, and then he said very quietly: “Gentlemen, see that this does not happen.” There was loud applause.
    And now it was Caecilius’s turn. He had risen from very humble origins, much more humble than Cicero’s, and he was not entirely without merit. One could even say he had some prior claim to prosecute, especially when he began by pointing out that his father had been a freed Sicilian slave, that he had been born in the province, and that the island was the place he loved most in the world. But his speech was full of statistics about falling agricultural production and Verres’s system of accounting. He sounded peevish rather than impassioned. Worse, he read it all out from notes, and in a monotone, so that when, after an hour, he approached his