Imperium

Young Gaius Cacurius had been obliged to give up all his furniture, and Lutatius a citrus-wood table at which Cicero had regularly eaten. Lyso had been robbed of his precious statue of Apollo, and Diodorus of a set of chased silver cups by Mentor. The list was endless, and I should know, for I was summoned to compile it. After taking statements from each of them, and subsequently from all their friends, I began to think that Cicero had gone a little mad—did he plan to catalogue every stolen spoon and cream jug on the island?—but of course he was cleverer than I, as events would show.
    We moved on a few days later, rattling down the unmade tracks from Lilybaeum to the temple city of Agrigentum, then up into the mountainous heart of the island. The winter was unusually harsh; the land and sky were iron. Cicero caught a bad cold and sat wrapped in his cloak in the back of our cart. At Henna, a town built precipitously into the cliffs and surrounded by lakes and woods, the ululating priests came out to greet us, wearing their elaborate robes and carrying their sacred boughs, and took us to the shrine of Ceres, from which Verres had removed the goddess’s statue. And here for the first time our escort became involved in scuffles with the lictors of the new governor, Lucius Metellus. These brutes with their rods and axes stood to one side of the market square and shouted threats of dire penalties for any witness who dared to testify against Verres. Nevertheless, Cicero persuaded three prominent citizens of Henna—Theodorus, Numenius, and Nicasio—to undertake to come to Rome and give their evidence.
    Finally we turned southeast toward the sea again, into the fertile plains below Mount Aetna. This was state-owned land, administered on behalf of the Roman treasury by a revenue-collection company, which in turn awarded leases to local farmers. When Cicero had first been on the island, the plains of Leontini had been the granary of Rome. But now we drove past deserted farmhouses and gray, untended fields, punctuated by drifting columns of brown smoke, where the homeless former tenants now lived in the open. Verres and his friends in the tax company had fanned out across the region like a ravaging army, commandeering crops and livestock for a fraction of their true value, and raising rents far beyond what most could pay. One farmer who had dared to complain, Nymphodorus of Centuripae, had been seized by Verres’s tithe collector, Apronius, and hanged from an olive tree in the marketplace of Aetna. Such stories enraged Cicero and drove him to fresh exertions. I still cherish the memory of this most urbane of gentlemen, his toga hoisted around his knees, his fine red shoes in one hand, his warrant in the other, picking his way daintily across a muddy field in the pouring rain to take evidence from a farmer at his plow. By the time we came at last to Syracuse, after more than thirty days of arduous travels around the province, we had the statements of nearly two hundred witnesses.
    Syracuse is by far the largest and fairest of Sicily’s cities. It is four towns, really, which have merged into one. Three of these—Achradina, Tycha, and Neapolis—have spread themselves around the harbor, and in the center of this great natural bay sits the fourth, known simply as the Island, the ancient royal seat, which is linked to the others by a bridge. This walled city-within-a-city, forbidden at night to Sicilians, is where the Roman governor has his palace, close by the great temples of Diana and Minerva. We had feared a hostile reception, given that Syracuse was said to be second only to Messana in its loyalty to Verres, and its senate had recently voted him a eulogy. In fact, the opposite was the case. News of Cicero’s honesty and diligence had preceded him, and we were escorted through the Agrigentine Gate by a crowd of cheering citizens. (One reason for Cicero’s popularity was that, as a young magistrate, he had located in the overgrown municipal cemetery the 130-year-old lost tomb of the mathematician Archimedes, the greatest man in the history of Syracuse. Typically, he had read somewhere that it was marked by a cylinder and a sphere, and once he had found the monument, he paid to have the weeds and brambles cleared away. He had then spent many hours beside it, pondering the transience of human glory. His generosity and respect had not been forgotten by the local population.)
    But to resume: we were lodged in the home of