Governors and governed

Verres is often seen as symptomatic of Roman rule abroad at this period, even allowing for gross exaggeration on Cicero’s part: a particularly rotten apple maybe, but one of a generally poor crop. The traditional assumption that military victory should turn into booty for the conqueror or that the defeated should pay for their defeat (as Carthage had done when Rome demanded vast reparations after the Second Punic War) died hard. Individual governors found that a posting overseas could be an easy opportunity for recouping some of the expenses of getting elected to political office in Rome, not to mention for pleasure of all kinds, away from the watchful eyes of their peers in Rome.

In a rousing speech given on his return from a junior post in Sardinia, Gaius Gracchus had sharp words for his colleagues who went out there with ‘amphorae full of wine and brought them home brimming with silver’ – a clear criticism of their profiteering, as well as a hint of their dim view of the local grape. Roman rule was for the most part fairly hands off by the standards of more recent imperial regimes: the locals kept their own calendars, their own coinages, their own gods, their own varied systems of law and civic government. But wherever and whenever it was more direct, it seems to have fallen somewhere on the spectrum between ruthlessly exploitative at one end and negligent, under-resourced and inefficient at the other.

Cicero’s experiences as governor of Cilicia in the late 50s BCE, described in vivid detail in his letters home, offer a glaring contrast to the depredations of Verres but still point to the messy reality of provincial government, with its endemic, chronic, low-level exploitation. Cilicia was a vast area of some 40,000 square miles in the wilds of what is now southern Turkey, with the island of Cyprus attached. Communications within the province were so unreliable that when Cicero first arrived he could not find out where his predecessor was, and three detachments of the two, under strength, underpaid and slightly mutinous, Roman legions stationed there seemed to have ‘gone missing’. Were they perhaps with the previous governor? No one knew.

At this point, Cicero, who had no previous army experience except a short stint as a teenager in the Social War, seized the chance to grab a little military glory. After one successful skirmish against some of the more resistant locals in the mountains, he even preened himself for camping on the same spot as Alexander the Great almost 200 years earlier. ‘A not inconsiderably better general than you or I,’ he wrote to Atticus, either with wry irony or else stating the obvious. But most of the rest of his time was divided between hearing court cases that involved Roman citizens, adjudicating disputes between provincials, controlling the behaviour of his small staff, who seem to have specialised in insulting the local residents, and dealing with the demands of various friends and acquaintances.

One young colleague in Rome pestered him to have some panthers caught and dispatched back to the city – to star, and be slaughtered, in shows he was putting on there. Cicero was evasive, claiming that the animals were in short supply: they must have decided to emigrate to the neighbouring province to escape the traps, he quipped. Less of a joking matter was a problem over loans made by Marcus Junius Brutus. The man who six years later led Caesar’s assassins was at this point up to his neck in usury, busy lending money to the people of Salamis, in Cyprus, at the illegal interest rate of 48 per cent. Cicero clearly sympathised with the Salaminians and withdrew the detachment of Roman soldiers that his predecessor had ‘lent’ to Brutus’ agents to help them extract what they were owed; they were said to have besieged the council chamber in Salamis and starved to death five of the local councillors. But then, rather than offend the well-connected creditor, he proceeded to turn a blind eye to the whole issue. His main priority, anyway, was to quit the province and the job of governor as soon as he legitimately could (‘the business bores me’). When his year was up, he walked out, leaving the vast region in the charge of one of his underlings, whom he admitted was ‘only a boy, probably stupid, with no authority or self-control’: so much for responsible government.

Yet that gloomy picture is only one side of the story of Roman provincial administration. Brutally as Roman demands must have fallen on many people in the provinces – and probably more brutally on the poor, whose plight almost all ancient writers ignore, than on the rich who came to Cicero’s attention – exploitation was not unchecked. It is too easy to forget that the only reason the lurid details of Verres’ misdeeds survive is that he was put on trial, and disgraced, for his treatment of the Sicilians. And Gaius Gracchus’ reference to grasping Roman officials was intended to draw a contrast with his own upright behaviour in Sardinia, as the man who ‘brought back empty the money belts [he] had taken out full of silver’ and who never put his hands on a prostitute or a pretty slave boy. Corruption, money grabbing and sex tourism were matters of public criticism, accusations regularly levelled at political rivals and convenient weapons in character assassination. They were not, so far as we know, matters for public celebration or even smug boasting.

Many of the tales of misdeeds were part of a wider discussion that began towards the end of the second century BCE about what the rules and ethical principles for overseas government should be, or – to put it even more generally – about how Rome should relate to the outside world when foreigners became people to be governed as well as fought. This was a distinctive, and novel, Roman contribution to political theory in the ancient world. Cicero’s earliest philosophical treatise, written in 59 BCE in the form of a letter to his brother, is largely concerned with honesty, integrity, impartiality and consistency in provincial rule. And a century before, in 149 BCE, a permanent criminal court had been established at Rome, with the main aim of giving foreigners compensation and the right of redress against extortion by their Roman rulers. No ancient Mediterranean empire had ever systematically tried to do this before. It may be a sign that corrupt government abroad started early. It also shows that there had long been a political will to tackle corruption. The law under which Verres was indicted, originally part of Gaius Gracchus’ reform programme, shows what an enormous amount of care, precision and sophisticated legal thought had been devoted to this problem by the 120s BCE.

Eleven fragments of Gaius’ compensation law, inscribed on bronze, were discovered around 1500 CE near Urbino in northern Italy. Two have since been lost and are known only from manuscript copies, but another was unearthed in the nineteenth century. Reassembled, in a jigsaw puzzle that has kept scholars occupied for half a millennium, they give us roughly half the text, which laid out the legal means for provincials to recover the value of what had been extorted from them by Roman officials, with damages on top. It is an extraordinary resource for understanding the practice and principles of Roman government, and an important reminder of the kind of information that, without such chance discoveries, easily slips through the net of the Roman historical tradition. For although Roman writers make passing allusion to this piece of legislation, they give no hint whatsoever that it was anything like what can be read here. The details have been preserved thanks only to the councillors of some Italian town in the late second century BCE, who decided to have the law inscribed on bronze for public display – and thanks to whoever stumbled across the fragments in the Renaissance and recognised their significance.

This is Roman law at its most careful and precise, demonstrating sophisticated skill in legal draughtsmanship almost without parallel anywhere in the classical world before this date, and a far cry from the pioneering but crude efforts of the Twelve Tables. The surviving Latin text runs to about ten modern pages and goes through every aspect of the process of redress, from the question of who is allowed to bring a case (‘any man of the Latin name or of foreign nations, or within the discretion, dominion, power or friendship of the Roman people’) to the rewards and compensation that are to follow a successful prosecution (damages are set at double the loss incurred, and full Roman citizenship is offered to a successful prosecutor). In between, all kinds of problems are addressed. Assistance with the prosecution (a simple form of legal aid) is promised to those who needed it, as foreigners might well do. Provision is made for getting money out of men, like Verres, who bolted before the verdict was announced. There are also strict rules laid down governing conflict of interest: no one who belonged to the same ‘club’ as the defendant could serve as one of the fifty jurors assigned to each case. Even the precise method of voting is specified. Each juror must indicate his vote on a piece of boxwood of a particular size and drop it into an urn, with his fingers over the writing to conceal his decision – and with a bare arm, presumably to prevent any kind of fiddling going on under the folds of a toga.

How effectively this worked in practice is hard to know. Just over thirty prosecutions are recorded between the passage of the law in the 120s BCE and the case against Verres in 70 BCE, and almost half of those resulted in convictions. But these incomplete statistics are only part of the story. Realistically, even the promised assistance with a prosecution might not have encouraged victims to travel halfway across the Mediterranean to try to get redress, in an unfamiliar language and in the unfamiliar legal system of the ruling power. Besides, compensation was to be made only for financial loss, not for other forms of maltreatment (there was nothing for cruelty, abuse or rape, for example). Nonetheless, the law leaves no doubt that radical politicians such as Gaius were starting to be concerned with the wider world, and with the plight of the disadvantaged and disempowered not only among Roman citizens but also among the subjects of Rome’s empire.