CHAPTER SEVEN

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FROM EMPIRE TO EMPERORS

Cicero versus Verres

WHILE THE GRIM crosses were still lining the Appian Way in 70 BCE, the year after the final defeat of Spartacus’ army, Cicero stood up in a Roman court to prosecute Gaius Verres on behalf of a number of wealthy Sicilians. His aim was to get them compensation for the thefts and depredations of Verres while he was the Roman governor of their island. The case launched Cicero’s career, as he spectacularly defeated the established lawyers and orators lined up in Verres’ defence. In fact, so spectacular was Cicero’s success that after two weeks of what was set to be a long trial, Verres decided that the outcome was hopeless and, before the court reconvened after a holiday break, went into voluntary exile in Marseilles, with many of his ill-gotten gains. He lived on there till 43 BCE, when he was put to death in another pogrom of proscriptions that followed the assassination of Julius Caesar. The reason, ostensibly, was that he had refused to let Mark Antony have some of his precious Corinthian bronze.

The case over, and keen not to waste his hard work, Cicero circulated in written form what he had said at the opening of the trial, along with the remaining speeches that he would have given against Verres had it continued. The full text of these still survives, copied and recopied throughout the ancient world and the Middle Ages as a model of how to denounce an enemy. Several hundred pages in all, it is a litany of lurid examples of Verres’ cruel exploitation of the inhabitants of Sicily, with flashbacks to earlier villainies before he reached the island in 73 BCE. It is the fullest account to survive of the crimes that Romans could commit abroad, under the cloak of their official status. For Cicero, the hallmark of Verres’ behaviour, in Sicily and in his earlier overseas postings, was a grotesque combination of cruelty, greed and lust, whether for women, cash or works of art.

Cicero details, at enormous length, Verres’ grooming of innocent virgins, his fiddling of the taxes, his profiteering from the corn supply, and his systematic thieving of some of the famous masterpieces of Sicily, interspersed with poignant tales of the victims. He lingers, for example, on the plight of one Heius, once the proud possessor of statues by some of the most renowned classical Greek sculptors, including Praxiteles and Polyclitus, heirlooms kept in a ‘shrine’ in his house. Other Romans had admired these, even borrowed them. Verres turned up and forced him to sell them for a ridiculously low price. Even worse, according to the culminating anecdote in this anthology of crime, was the fate of Publius Gavius, a Roman citizen living in Sicily. Verres had Gavius thrown into prison, tortured and crucified, on the specious grounds that he was a spy for Spartacus. Roman citizenship should have protected him from this degrading punishment. So, as he was flogged, the poor man repeatedly cried out, ‘Civis Romanus sum’ (‘I am a Roman citizen’), but to no avail. Presumably, when they chose to repeat this phrase, both Palmerston and Kennedy (see p. 137) must have forgotten that its most famous ancient use was as the unsuccessful plea of an innocent victim under a sentence of death imposed by a rogue Roman governor.

Judging a court case two thousand years old, when the arguments of only one side survive, and most of those written up later, is an impossible task. As prosecutors are almost bound to do, Cicero certainly exaggerated the wickedness of Verres, in a memorable but sometimes misleading combination of moral outrage, half-truths, self-promotion and jokes (in particular on the name ‘Verres’, which literally means ‘hog’ or perhaps ‘snout in the trough’). And there are all kinds of cracks in his argument that any decent defence might well have exploited. Dreadful as the punishment of Gavius was, for example, no responsible Roman official on Sicily at that date could have failed to be on the lookout for agents of Spartacus; in fact, Spartacus was widely reported to be planning to cross to the island. Whatever Heius’ regret at parting with his statues, and for such a low price, Cicero does concede that they were sold, not stolen (and anyway, were they really the original masterpieces they were cracked up to be?). Nevertheless, the defendant’s hasty departure suggests that he was guilty enough of the charges laid before him to make a tactical retreat into a comfortable exile seem the sensible option.

This notorious case is just one of many controversies and dilemmas about Roman rule overseas that erupted during the last century of the Republic. By the 70s BCE, with vast territories under Roman sway as the result of two centuries of fighting, negotiation, aggression and good luck, the nature of Roman power and the Romans’ assumptions about their relationship to the world they now dominated were changing. In the broadest terms, the rudimentary empire of obedience had at least partly transformed into an empire of annexation. Provincia had come to mean ‘province’ in the sense of a defined region under direct Roman control rather than just ‘responsibility’ or ‘job’, and the word imperium was now occasionally used in the sense of ‘empire’. These shifts in terminology point to new concepts of Roman territory and a new framework of organisation, which raised new questions about what government abroad meant. How was a Roman governor expected to behave in the provinces? How was his job defined? What voice were the provincial populations to have, particularly in seeking redress against misrule? And what was to count as misrule? Issues of provincial government were brought into the very heart of domestic political debate. One precious piece of evidence for this is the text of the law under which Verres was prosecuted. It does not have the fame of Cicero’s showy rhetoric, but it takes us behind the scenes to Roman attempts to devise a legal framework, and practical arrangements, for the rights of provincials.

Even more controversial, and central to the eventual collapse of Republican government, were questions of who could be trusted with the command, control and administration of the empire. Who was to govern the provinces, to collect the taxes, to command, or serve in, Rome’s armies? Was the traditional governing class, with its principles of shared and short-term power, capable of handling the vast problems, administrative and military, that the empire now threw up? At the very end of the second century BCE, Gaius Marius, a ‘new man’, loudly blamed a string of Roman military defeats on the corruption of Rome’s commanders, always open to a well-placed bribe. He went on to base a political career on his ability to score notable victories where they had disastrously failed, and to be elected consul no fewer than seven times, five in a row.

This was a pattern of repeated office holding that Sulla later banned, in his reforms of the late 80s BCE. But the underlying problem did not go away. The demands of defending, policing and sometimes extending the empire encouraged, or compelled, the Romans to hand over enormous financial and military resources to individual commanders for years on end, in a way that challenged the traditional structures of the state even more fundamentally than disputes at home between optimates and populares ever did. By the middle of the first century BCE, riding on the back of overseas conquest, Pompey the Great and Julius Caesar had become rivals for autocratic power: they commanded what were effectively their own private armies; they had flouted Republican principles even more comprehensively than Sulla or Marius; and they had opened up the prospect of one-man rule, which Caesar’s assassination did not block.

In short, as the last part of this chapter reveals, the empire created the emperors – not the other way round.