Imperium

distinguished citizens of the city, among them the chief priest of Jupiter, all dressed up in his sacred robes. This pontificate, traditionally reserved for the highest-ranking Syracusan, was held presently by none other than Cicero’s client, Heraclius, who had returned privately from Rome to help us, at considerable personal risk. He came with a request that Cicero should immediately accompany him to the city’s senate chamber, where the elders were waiting to give him a formal civic welcome. Cicero was of two minds. He had much work to do, and it was undoubtedly a breach of protocol for a Roman senator to address a local assembly without the permission of the governor. However, it also promised to be a wonderful opportunity to further his inquiries. After a short hesitation, he agreed to go, and we duly set off on foot back down the hill with a huge escort of respectful Sicilians.
    The Senate chamber was packed. Beneath a gilded statue of Verres himself, the house’s most senior senator, the venerable Diodorus, welcomed Cicero in Greek and apologized for the fact that they had so far offered him no assistance: not until the events of today had they truly believed he was in earnest. Cicero, also speaking in Greek, and fired up by the scenes he had just witnessed, made a brilliant off-the-cuff speech in which he promised to dedicate his life to righting the injustices done to the people of Sicily. At the end of it, the Syracusan senators voted almost unanimously to rescind their eulogy to Verres (which they swore they had been pressured into by Metellus) and amid loud cheers, several younger members threw ropes around the neck of Verres’s statue and pulled it down. More important, others fetched out of the senate’s secret archives a wealth of new evidence which they had been collecting about Verres’s crimes. These outrages included the theft of twenty-seven priceless portraits from the Temple of Minerva—even the highly decorated doors of the sanctuary had been carried away!—as well as details of all the bribes Verres had demanded to bring in “not guilty” verdicts when he was a judge.
    News of this assembly and the toppling of the statue had by now reached the governor’s palace, and when we tried to leave the Senate House we found the building ringed with Roman soldiers. The meeting was dissolved on Metellus’s orders, Heraclius arrested, and Cicero ordered to report to the governor at once. There could easily have been a bloody riot, but Cicero leapt up onto the back of a cart and told the Sicilians to calm themselves, that Metellus would not dare to harm a Roman senator acting on the authority of a praetor’s court—although he did add, and only half in jest, that if he had not emerged by nightfall, they might perhaps make inquiries as to his whereabouts. He then clambered down and we allowed ourselves to be conducted over the bridge and onto the Island.
    The Metellus family were at this time approaching the zenith of their power. In particular, the branch of the clan that had produced the three brothers, Quintus, Lucius, and Marcus—all then in their forties—looked set to dominate Rome for years to come. It was, as Cicero said, a three-headed monster, and this middle head—the second brother, Lucius—was in many ways the most formidable of all. He received us in the royal chamber of the governor’s palace with the full panoply of his imperium —an imposing, handsome figure, seated in his curule chair beneath the unyielding marble gaze of a dozen of his predecessors, flanked by his lictors, with his junior magistrate and his clerks behind him, and an armed sentry on the door.
    “It is a treasonable offense,” he began, without rising and without preliminaries, “to foment rebellion in a Roman province.”
    “It is also a treasonable offense,” retorted Cicero, “to insult the people and Senate of Rome by impeding their appointed representative in his duties.”
    “Really? And what kind of ‘Roman representative’ addresses a Greek Senate in its native tongue? Everywhere you have gone in this province, you have stirred up trouble. I will not have it! We have too small a garrison to keep order among so many natives. You are making this place ungovernable, with your damned agitation.”
    “I assure you, governor, the resentment is against Verres, not against Rome.”
    “Verres!” Metellus banged the arm of his chair. “Since when did you care about Verres? I shall tell you