4
As early as 1914, the American classicist H. V. Canter published an article significantly titled ‘The impeachment of Verres and Hastings: Cicero and Burke’.1 Despite dating back more than a hundred years, Canter’s study represents to this day a starting point for those interested in the relationship between the arraignment of Verres and the impeachment of Warren Hastings. The essay by Canter is especially illuminating because it explores references to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scholars and politicians, such as Macaulay and Lord Erskine (1750–1823), who discussed general resemblances and differences between the two illustrious cases. No less importantly, Canter also offers a more personal analysis, providing some examples of textual comparison between Cicero’s In Verrem and Burke’s speeches against the former Governor-General of Bengal.
More recently, on the occasion of the bicentenary commemoration of the impeachment of Hastings organized by the University of Edinburgh, the discussion was resumed by Geoffrey Carnall, who described in broad terms the importance of Cicero as a model for Burke.2 Since then, though a number of scholars from different backgrounds (including Marshall, Whelan and Ayres) have variously remarked on this fascinating relationship, hitherto no full-length study has been devoted to an analysis contrasting the Latin and English texts.3
In this chapter, I address this gap and, by attempting to fill it, I indicate some fruitful lines of enquiry for further research. Inevitably, a problem arises with any discussion of Burke’s orations, particularly those against Hastings: the text is so extensive as to render commentary on it rather diffuse.4 To meet this difficulty, I have deliberately chosen to restrict my attention to the so-called ‘Speech on the Opening of the Impeachment’.5 Pronounced on 15, 16, 18 and 19 February 1788, this was ‘by far’ – as F. P. Lock has put it – ‘[Burke’s] most ambitious effort to date’.6 It has been calculated that, with its written text running to over 80,000 words, this four-day performance lasted about eleven hours.7 Owing to its extensive length and importance (in substance, if not formally, this oration opened the trial), the speech may be regarded as a significant example with a general application.
It is not surprising that many contemporaries considered this oration ‘as one of the greatest rhetorical achievements’ of their time.8 Indeed, Burke’s harangue received eloquent accolades: even those who were extremely sympathetic to the accused, such as Frances Burney and Hannah More (1745–1833), paid tribute to its power.9 Just as importantly, newspapers commented extensively on this speech. The Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser (19 February 1788), for example, praised the tirade of 16 February as a ‘Philippic against arbitrary power’, one that was ‘altogether without parallel’. Similarly, The Times (18 February 1788) praised the orator’s second-day speech as ‘perhaps the most eloquent oration ever delivered in a Court of Judicature’.
It goes without saying that Burke’s ‘Speech on the Opening of the Impeachment’ and Cicero’s In Verrem may be juxtaposed and analysed within numerous discursive frameworks and from different perspectives. Some may be concerned, for instance, with matters of form or style, while others would rather emphasize political issues, such as the administration of justice in the Roman provinces and the British colonies, and in India in particular. Inevitably, pressures of space restrict what can be discussed here, so I have decided to concentrate on resemblances, rather than evident and more widely recognized differences. Among others, I will focus on the semantic fields utilized by Cicero and Burke to describe the defendants, as well as on ‘vivid description’.
Because my analysis is mostly based upon a philological comparison, before I turn to the Latin and English texts, it is important to add a note on the written version of Burke’s orations.10 Critics, such as Paddy Bullard, have stressed that only a small proportion of the myriad speeches that Burke made in Parliament was, in fact, recorded with accuracy.11 This is why the task of assessing the authority of the transcriptions often presents formidable difficulties. Luckily enough, the long and complex ‘Speech on the Opening of the Impeachment’ was transcribed by the most esteemed shorthand writer of the time, Joseph Gurney (1744–1815), who, in most cases, managed to record the proceedings of the trial almost verbatim.12 As a matter of fact, Gurney’s ‘impeccable’ transcriptions constitute a fuller and more reliable basis than any of the newspapers’ records, which are normally the principal source for parliamentary debates.13
While borrowings from and allusions to Cicero are noticeable in the ‘Speech on the Opening of the Impeachment’, neither the Verrine Orations nor their villain protagonist are ever referred to directly. In fact, throughout the eight years of the trial, Burke alluded to the propraetor of Sicily and the orations In Verrem only twice. In the first instance, the Anglo-Irish orator compared Hastings to Verres, while discussing the Governor’s illegal receipt of presents from the Indians (21 April 1789): ‘He [Hastings] has just got the same character as Caius Verres got in another cause’.14 The equation of Hastings–Verres was restated several years later in the ‘Speech in Reply’, on 16 June 1794. This time, not only did Burke allude to the governor of Sicily, but he also referenced Cicero’s orations against Verres: ‘We have all in our early education read the Verronean [sic] orations. […] In these orations you see almost every instance of rapacity and peculation which we charge upon Mr. Hastings’.15
On a more general level, echoes of the Verrines are apparent from the very first sentences pronounced on 15 February 1788. In this respect, the incipit of the ‘Speech on the Opening of the Impeachment’ constitutes a distillation of Burke’s strategic appropriations and adaptations of his Roman counterpart:16 as we shall see, Burke modelled after the Actio Prima, imitating Cicero’s oration in order and arguments.
Money and corruption
In her study of In Verrem, Ann Vasaly has noted that ‘the beginning of the exordium (1–10) immediately turns to the thematic crux of the oration: that in this case it is not just Verres who is on trial, but the senatorial ordo itself’.17 In 82 BC, some ten years before the arraignment of the propraetor of Sicily, the Senate had in fact been granted by Sulla the monopoly of jury-membership (lex Cornelia iudiciaria).18 According to Cicero, it was rumoured not only at Rome, but also abroad (Verr. I.1: Inveteravit enim iam opinio […] non modo apud nos sed apud exteras nationes) that a rich man, though guilty, could not be condemned (I.1: pecuniosum hominem, quamvis sit nocens, neminem posse damnari). If Verres were acquitted – Cicero continued – the evident guilt of the defendant, as well as his renowned wealth, would lead everyone to assume that the ex-governor of Sicily had successfully corrupted the judges.19
Within this context, the orator presents the prosecution of Verres as a heaven-sent opportunity (I.1: prope divinitus datum) for the senatorial jurors:20 a conviction will allow them to recover the favour of the Roman people and give satisfaction to foreign nations (I.2: redire in gratiam cum populo Romano, satis facere exteris nationibus). The exterae nationes are a constant presence throughout the Verrines: Cicero repeatedly highlights how the trial is enacted not only in the presence of the Roman people, but also usque ad ultimas terras (II.4.64).21
In parallel with Cicero’s exhortations to the Senate to prove incorruptible, on the first day of the ‘Speech on the Opening of the Impeachment’ Burke warns the Lords against ‘narrow partiality, so destructive of justice’ (p. 278). Like his ancient counterpart, the Anglo-Irish orator urges the Lords to be beyond reproach, for ‘the credit and the honour of the British nation will itself be decided by this decision’ (p. 271). Both the Roman Senate and the Lords appear to be characterized, in Frederick G. Whelan’s words, ‘as embodying justice and the other values of natural law, and thus as satisfactorily realizing the proper ends of social life’.22 As a latter-day Rome, Britain is responsible for administering justice over different peoples and cultures, and it is from this perspective of ‘Imperial justice’ that we should read Burke’s obsessive repetitions of the word ‘justice’, particularly in the exordium of his speech: ‘What the greatest Inquest of the Nation has begun, its highest Tribunal will accomplish. Justice will be done to India’ (p. 270); ‘your Lordships always had a boundless power; I mean always within the limits of justice’ (p. 277); ‘they [‘tribes of suffering nations’] are come here to supplicate justice at your Lordships’ Bar; and I hope and trust that there will be no rule, formed upon municipal maxims, which will prevent the Imperial justice which you owe to the people that call to you from all parts of a great disjointed empire’ (p. 277).23
Echoing Cicero’s allusions to the exterae nationes and ultimae terrae, Burke reminds the Lords that they ‘try the Cause of Asia in the presence of Europe’ (p. 278) and argues vigorously that the conduct of the British Empire ‘in that very elevated situation to which it has arisen, will undoubtedly be scrutinized’ (p. 277). In this sense, the Lords are encouraged to uphold Roman conceptions of virtue and law, but are also alerted to the risk ‘of being corrupted’. Once again, the British Empire in India is identified with Rome in the first century BC: from the start of the prosecution Burke makes the Roman point that the sudden influx of wealth from the East may infect and corrupt the ruling class:
It is well known that great wealth has poured into this country from India; and it is no derogation to us to suppose the possibility of being corrupted by that by which great Empires have been corrupted, and by which assemblies almost as respectable and as venerable as your Lordships’ have been known to be indirectly shaken. My Lords, when I say that forty millions of money have come from India to England, we ought to take great care that corruption does not follow, and we may venture to say that the best way to secure a man’s reputation is, not by a proud defiance of public opinion, but by guiding one’s actions in such a way as that public opinion may afterwards and not previously be defied (pp. 277–8).
The attack on luxury as the source of vice was a commonplace in Cicero’s days. Roman historians of the late Republic ‘pointed to the flow of luxury goods into Rome following its foreign conquests as the reason for the distruction of the morally upright city of the maiores and for its subsequent corruption’.24 Notably, Polybius noted a growing corruption among the Roman youth, stemming from their encounter with oriental and, particularly, Greek vices. As Cicero – particularly in the Actio Prima – associates corruption (corruptio) with money (pecunia),25 so does Burke relate ‘great wealth’ and ‘money’ to dishonesty. In the above passage, bribery appears so concrete a threat that the words ‘corrupted’ and ‘corruption’ are reiterated three times (‘it is no derogation to us to suppose the possibility of being corrupted’; ‘great Empires have been corrupted’; ‘we ought to take great care that corruption does not follow’).26
If Burke had Rome in mind when he alluded to ‘great Empires’, this was not the first time that he had associated the collapse of the Roman Empire with ‘the mal-administration of its provinces’. In his ‘Speech on Motion for Papers on Hastings’ (20 February 1786), for example, he remarked:
The downfall of the greatest empire this world ever saw, has been, on all hands agreed upon to have originated in the mal-administration of its provinces. Rome never felt within herself the seeds of decline, till corruption from foreign misconduct impaired her vitals, and as an elegant commentator upon the orations of Cicero – Midianus says, prevaricatione testimonii, (by prevarication of testimony) the inroads of corruption destroyed the political frame, then were all things at stake (p. 63).27
If we are to believe the reporter of the General Advertiser, who is the source of this speech, Burke’s reflection on the downfall of Rome was significantly complemented by an allusion to the arraignment of Verres (‘Verres the Governor of Sicily was accused by Cicero, for the mal-administration of the province committed to his care’ (p. 63)).28
The preoccupation that Britain might experience what had befallen Rome – namely, that oriental vices might infect her and bring about the demise of her imperial power – was not new. A sense of decadence and corruption ‘imported from the East’ appears very clearly, for example, in a passage from David Hume’s 1752 essay Of Refinement in the Arts:
Ancient Rome, […] having learned from its conquered provinces the Asiatic luxury, fell into every kind of corruption; whence arose sedition and civil wars, attended at last with the total loss of liberty. All the Latin classics, whom we peruse in our infancy, are full of these sentiments, and universally ascribe the ruin of their state to the art and riches imported from the East.29
As the end of the century approached, anxieties about Britain’s Empire intensified, with many fearing an irreversible descent into vice through exposure to the corrupting East. In this respect, it is important to note that the East India Company’s employees who came to be known as ‘nabobs’ became, across the last half of the eighteenth century, the centre of attention of public concern. ‘Rich as Croesus and hungry for power’, to use Tillman W. Nechtman’s expression, nabobs had been acquiring enormous fortunes in India through illegal private trade since the time of Robert Clive.30 Among the numerous examples that may be drawn from British literature or theatre, particularly in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, The nabob (1772) by Samuel Foote (1720–77) proves how the term nabob grew to be a commonly used negative epithet.31 Besides being perceived to corrupt British society through what Andrew Rudd calls ‘debauched Oriental habits’, such as ‘smoking hookahs and arranging erotic nautch dances’,32 nabobs were regarded as a danger to Britain’s political establishment, as the words of William Pitt the Elder, the Earl of Chatham (1708–78), notably suggest:
The riches of Asia have been poured in upon us, and have brought with them not only Asiatic Luxury, but, I fear, Asiatic principle of government. Without connections, without any natural interest in the soil, the importers of foreign gold have forced their way into Parliament by such a torrent of private corruption as no hereditary fortune could resist.33
In 1783, long before the beginning of the trial, Burke had similarly warned the Commons of the dangers arising from ‘Young [English]men (boys almost)’ sent to India who, like rapacious ‘birds of prey’, had made ‘a sudden fortune’.34 ‘Arrived in England’ – Burke vehemently continued – ‘They marry into your families; they enter into your senate; they ease your estates by loans; they raise their value by demands; they cherish and protect your relations which lie heavy on your patronage’.35 Commenting on this passage from the ‘Speech on Fox’s India Bill’, Iain Hampsher-Monk has emphasized how ‘The nabobs were to Burke the modern equivalents of Roman provincial governors, returning home glutted with spoils, which they will spend inflating prices and corrupting domestic politics’.36 Seen from this angle, the princeps of nabobs was, of course, Hastings.
‘You do not decide the Case only; you fix the rule’
It is possibly not coincidental that in 1788, the year of the opening of the impeachment, Edward Gibbon published the last volume of his Decline and Fall (1776–88). If we locate the history of the Roman Empire, as Phiroze Vasunia suggests, within the eighteenth-century British imperial context, then ‘the implication of Gibbon’s work must be that the future of the British Empire, too, lies in its colonies and that its longevity, or collapse, turns on the way in which Britain manages its relationship with its overseas possessions’.37
In this respect, Burke’s admonition to the Lords acquires particular importance: ‘The question is, not solely whether the prisoner at the Bar be found innocent or be found guilty, but whether millions of mankind shall be miserable or happy. You do not decide the Case only; you fix the rule’ (pp. 270–1). Likewise, the outcome of the ‘Verres affair’ is crucial not just for Sicily but to the whole Empire.38 In the third section of the Actio Secunda Cicero emphasizes that, in case of Verres’s acquittal, other improbi will act without fear of conviction: ‘Rome will find herself without hope of escaping doom, if the precedents set by one scoundrel are to secure the acquittal and impunity of another’ (Verr. II.3.207: rei publicae salus deerit, si improborum exemplis improbi iudicio ac periculo liberabuntur).39
A few years before the opening of the trial, a similar view was also expressed by the philosopher William Godwin (1756–1836). Between August 1785 and December 1786, he published a series of letters in The Political and Herald Review under the pseudonym of Mucius. The choice of this pseudonym ‘is of particular interest’.40 According to Roman legend, Gaius Mucius Scaevola was a young Roman who, when the king of Clusium, Lars Porsenna, threatened to restore the tyrannical rule of Tarquinius Superbus, volunteered to assassinate him. Instead, he killed by mistake his victim’s secretary. Brought before the king, he thrust his right hand over a blazing fire and declared that he was one of three hundred Roman youths willing to make the same sacrifice as himself. Deeply impressed by Mucius’s courage, Porsenna ordered him to be freed. As Jonathan Sachs explains, ‘Mucius’s actions can be seen as a quintessential example of the virtuous patriotism that Godwin was anxious to uphold’.41
Most significant for our discussion here is the fifth letter. Addressed to Henry Dundas (1742–1811), one of the politicians who voted for the impeachment of the Governor-General, this letter draws a close analogy between the prosecution of Hastings and that of Verres. After an initial ominous prediction of the interminable length into which the impeachment ‘must inevitably run, and lose in its continual recurrence the honesty of inquiry and the value of the subject’, Godwin notes that Cicero was the first to ‘openly and fearlessly’ face one of the most notorious criminals.42 As a result of the common practice of bribing tribunals, most ‘peculators and oppressors of the distant provinces’ were, in fact, acquitted.43 Moved by his love for the Roman name, as well as by ‘the sufferings of the defenceless dependents of the state’, Cicero undertook the cause of the Sicilians and ‘in theirs […] he undertook the cause of every province of the empire, and the character of Rome’.44 The outcomes of Cicero’s irresistible eloquence are subsequently highlighted by Mucius/Godwin: ‘From this moment the government of the provinces was moderated; the guilty became timid, cautious and silent’.45 Cicero’s orations against Verres are thus interpreted by the British philosopher as a turning point in the Roman administration of justice.
Similarly, Burke’s warning to the Lords, ‘You do not decide the Case only; you fix the rule’ (pp. 270–1), alludes to the crucial consequences that the decision of the House of Lords will have on the administration of justice within the British Empire. Godwin concludes his remarks with what may be regarded as a sententia which, mutatis mutandis, may have been applicable to Britain as well: ‘It is perhaps from the sentence against Verres that we are to account for the protracted duration of the Roman Empire’.46 If we compare this consideration with the previous assertion that ‘the utility of history is to enable us to discover from former examples, the clue that may guide us through the intricacies of those which are present’, we may conclude that if Britain is keen on maintaining the ‘protracted duration’ of her Empire – as Godwin seems to suggest – she should take the Roman example and convict Hastings.47
While the repercussions of both final verdicts may be similar, Cicero and Burke differ widely in their modes of addressing the jury. Besides utilizing the exhortative subjunctive,48 Cicero often directs his remarks to the Senate in the imperative form.49 As a matter of fact, the orator’s position as a novus homo permits him to play the role of senator among senators and, at the same time, to be a critic of the hereditary senatorial ordo. Conversely, Burke suggests that the Lords are summae auctoritates and represent the ‘Supreme power’ (p. 272).50 As a result, rather than employing the imperative, the Anglo-Irish orator chooses to direct his remarks to the Lords by means of exhortative expressions, including ‘we ought to take great care’; ‘we may venture to say’ (p. 277). Other times – mostly when he intends to dissuade or prevent the jury from what he considers a wrong decision or action – Burke makes use of indirect formulas, such as ‘God forbid that’.51
As I mentioned earlier, it is not my aim here to dwell on general differences between the two trials.52 Nonetheless, we are not to lose sight of the many contrasts that one may readily detect in Cicero’s and Burke’s speeches. For example, we can examine the representations of the oppressed Sicilians and Indians respectively, since one of the most striking moments of divergence is how Cicero and Burke portray the wronged and the oppressed. Unlike the Roman lawyer who refers to the provincials as socii – that is to say, loyal allies who were not yet equal to the cives Romani – Burke describes the Indians as ‘mankind’, thus bringing into prominence the equal conditions existing between colonizers and colonized. Within this perspective, the crimes committed in India appear to be more serious than those perpetrated in Sicily. As we will see below, it is certainly not coincidental that the protagonist of one of the most pathetic scenes described in the Verrines, Publius Gavius, was not a socius but a civis Romanus.
Vicious villains
In a number of cases, it is evident that Burke has Cicero in mind and wants his audience to picture the Governor-General of Bengal as a latter-day Verres. Indeed, not only are Hastings’s tyrannical and corrupt methods of governing very similar to those employed by Verres, but both men are portrayed as the quintessential incarnations of all sorts of evils and cruelties. In the opening of the first Verrine, the propraetor of Sicily is variously described as someone who ‘has robbed the Treasury, and plundered Asia and Pamphylia; he has behaved like a pirate in his city of praetorship, and like a destroying pestilence in his province of Sicily’ (Verr. I.2: depeculatorem aerarii, vexatorem Asiae atque Pamphyliae, praedonem iuris urbani, labem atque perniciem provinciae Siciliae).53 Among Verres’s plethora of vices, Cicero persistently highlights the governor’s thirst for riches: furta atque flagitia (I.7); se cupidum pecuniae fuisse (I.8); avarissimi hominis cupiditati (I.41); Deinde est eius modi reus in quo homine nihil sit praeter summa peccata maximamque pecuniam (I.47).
No less importantly, the Roman orator discredits the defendant by means of adjectives that denote audacity, lack of good sense, corruption and dissolution. In short, the governor’s life – tot vitiis flagitiisque convictam (I.10) – appears to be entirely consecrated to avaritia, scelere, periurio (I.42). In the Actio Prima, for instance, Verres is variously referred to as audax (I.5), homo audacissimus atque amentissimus (I.7); homo amens ac perditus (I.15); hominem perditissimum atque alienissimum (I.28); homo nocentissimus pecuniosissimusque (I.47). As these examples suggest, the propraetor of Sicily is not termed vir but homo. This lexical choice may not be coincidental: whereas vir points to those qualities that constitute the man (and, hence, it often designates ‘a hero’), homo is applicable to any of the human species indiscriminately and does not imply any peculiar merit or excellence.
Similarly, Hastings is portrayed as a vicious villain: couching the defendant in his rhetoric of evil, Burke argues vigorously that the misdeeds committed by ‘the most daring criminal that ever existed’ (p. 295) are the results of a wicked and corrupt soul. Right from the beginning of the ‘Speech on the Opening of the Impeachment’, the Anglo-Irish orator depicts the Governor-General of Bengal as a cruel oriental despot, ‘the first man in rank, authority and station; […] the head, the chief, the captain-general in iniquity; one in whom all the frauds, all the peculations, all the violence, all the tyranny in India are embodied, disciplined and arrayed’ (pp. 275–6). In this respect, Anna Clark has significantly stressed that, with his representation of the Governor-General’s crimes in ‘hyperbolic racial terms’, Burke implies that Hastings ‘became too Indian, an oriental despot himself’:54
They are crimes that have their rise in avarice, rapacity, pride, cruelty, ferocity, malignity of temper, haughtiness, insolence. In short, my Lords, in everything that manifests a heart blackened to the very blackest, a heart dyed deep in blackness, a heart corrupted, vitiated and gangrened to the very core (p. 275).55
This sample attests to Burke’s verbal richness and rhetorical skill: besides giving memorable form to the passage, the triple repetition of terms derived from the same root (‘blackened’, ‘blackest’ and ‘blackness’) emphasizes the pathos of the image. Owing to his extraordinary skill to use rhetoric at once to portray Hastings in morally unambiguous terms and to fill his speech with emotive appeal, Burke presents his audience here with the instantly recognizable black-hearted villain of contemporary melodrama and Gothic romance.
Like the two faces of the coin, both the propraetor of Sicily and the Governor-General represent the quintessence of omnia vitia/‘all the frauds’. Indeed, Burke’s hyperbolic description of Hastings as ‘one in whom all the frauds, all the peculations, all the violence, all the tyranny in India are embodied, disciplined and arrayed’ may well have been modelled after Verres’s description: ‘Now I am denouncing a single man for all the offences of which an abandoned scoundrel can be guilty; I assert that in this one man’s life you may discern all the possible signs of licentious and unscrupulous wickedness’ (Verr. II.3.5: Ego in uno homine omnia vitia quae possunt in homine perdito nefarioque esse reprehendo; nullum esse dico indicium libidinis, sceleris, audaciae, quod non in istius unius vita perspicere possitis).
Interestingly enough, most terms referring to Hastings’s ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’ are formed from a Latin root and, what is more, echo Verres’s misdeeds. So, for instance, Burke’s charges of ‘avarice, rapacity, pride, cruelty, ferocity, malignity of temper, haughtiness, insolence’ parallel Cicero’s accusations of furta, rapinas, cupiditatem, crudelitatem, superbiam, scelus, audaciam (II.5.32). In particular, while Hastings’s ‘rapacity’ mirrors Verres’s furta and rapinas, the latter’s crudelitatem and superbiam reverberate in the former’s ‘cruelty’, ‘haughtiness’ and ‘insolence’. Often, the Roman orator focuses on Verres’s audacia, associating it with other vices.56 In the same vein, Burke repeatedly brings into prominence Hastings’s ‘audacity’: ‘Mr. Hastings had the audacity, […] he had the audacity’ (p. 444).
As much as Verres and Hastings embody every sort of wickedness, so are their accomplices – Apronius and Timarchides on the one hand, and Gunga Govin Sing (Ganga Govind Singh) and Debi Sing (Devi Singh) on the other – the quintessence of cruelty, audacity and corruption. Quintus Apronius, the most notorious among the tithe collectors of Sicily, is first introduced as ‘the man whom Verres […] adjudged most like himself in villany, profligacy and reckless wickedness’.57 Cicero repeatedly refers to his ‘unique rascality’ (Verr. II.3.22: improbitate singulari), as well as to his ‘impudent depravity and cruelty’ (Verr. II.3.24: audaciae, nequitiae, crudelitati), and variously calls him ‘dirty scoundrel’, ‘filthy scoundrel’ and ‘a filthy immoral brute whose mind was as inevitably unwholesome as the very breath of his mouth was inevitably foul’.58 The same is true of Timarchides, ‘his [Apronius’s] twin and his double in immorality and rascality and effrontery’ (Verr. II.3.155: Consorti quidem in lucris atque furtis, gemino et simillimo nequitia, improbitate, audacia). Catherine Steel acutely notes that Cicero’s discussion of Verres’s henchmen serves a number of functions.59 One effect is to reinforce the characterization of Verres as an inadequate magistrate: he has surrounded himself with, and put in positions of power, individuals who are patently wicked and vicious. Moreover, the prominence given to Verres’s cohors and their wrongdoing ‘enables Cicero to structure his characterization of Verres as a gradual revelation of his vices’.60
As for the Governor-General’s partners in crime, Ganga Govind Singh – a revenue administrator in Bengal who, according to P. J. Marshall, enjoyed Hastings’s ‘confidence to an unusual degree’ and was ‘looked upon by the natives as the second person in the government if not the first’61 – is portrayed as ‘the most wicked, the most atrocious, the boldest, the most dexterous villain that ever the rank servitude of that country has produced’ (p. 400); ‘the basest, the wickedest, the corruptest, the most audacious and atrocious, villain ever heard of’ (p. 401); ‘a tool in the hands of Mr Hastings’, ‘employed in taking corrupt bribes and corrupt presents for Mr Hastings’ (p. 403). Ganga Govind Singh’s conduct is later described as ‘licentious and unwarrantable, oppressive and extortionary’ (p. 441), inspired by ‘fraud’, ‘profit’, ‘heavy iniquity’, ‘wickedness’ and ‘atrocious iniquity’ (p. 446). Not surprisingly, even ‘his public services’ are associated with ‘scenes of wickedness, barbarity and corruption’ (p. 443).
Equally, Devi Singh – the revenue administrator under whom the so-called ‘Rangpur atrocities’ were allegedly committed – is turned into a ‘consummate villain’, an ‘insolent criminal’ (p. 431). Ganga Govind Singh and Devi Singh are then sarcastically associated by Burke, who maintains that ‘they had been rivals in virtue’. In order to amplify the irony of his statement, the Irish-born orator quotes two lines from Virgil’s Eclogues: Arcades ambo,| Et cantare pares et respondere parat (Ecl. 7, 4–5).62
Focusing on Ganga Govind Singh’s iniquities, Burke narrates that the former had been appointed by Hastings as guardian of a minor rajah. Not unexpectedly, instead of protecting the nine-year-old child’s interest, he appropriated his lands ‘by a fraudulent and probably a forged deed. […] But whether it was forged or not’ – Burke adds with a tinge of pathos – ‘this miserable minor was obliged to give the lands to him. He did not dare to quarrel with him upon such a matter’ (p. 446).
Episodes of orphans defrauded of their legacy can also be found in Cicero’s Verrines, particularly in the first book of the Actio Secunda. Among the long list of the propraetor’s illegal appropriation of inheritances (Verr. II.1.104–54), Cicero narrates the story of young Malleolus. Following the death of his father (Gaius Malleolus), the child was made a ward of Verres, who did not hesitate to launch ‘an attack upon his [young Malleolus’s] property’ (Verr. II.1.90: cum pupilli Malleoli tutor esset, in bona eius impetum fecit). The tone of Cicero’s discourse is both indignant – not only was young Malleolus an orphan, but also the son of a colleague63 – and full of pathos. The Roman orator, in fact, imagines that the child, along with his mother and grandmother, is present in the court. By means of highly evocative words, the figures of Malleolus and the two women suddenly appear in front of our eyes: ‘it is young Malleolus whom I have brought into court, it is his mother and grandmother, who testify with tears in their eyes, poor creatures, that you have cheated the boy out of his patrimony’.64
Among the Governor-General’s ruling passions, Burke emphasizes his avarice and rapacity: ‘Mr. Hastings’s crimes had root in that which is the root of all evil, I mean avarice; that avarice and rapacity were the groundwork and foundation of all his other vicious system’ (p. 371). In the speech delivered on 18 February, Burke remarkably transforms Hastings into a monster of ‘avarice’ and ‘ferocious and unrelenting rapacity’ (p. 374):
I proposed, first of all, to show your Lordships that those crimes had their root in that which is the origin of all evil, avarice and rapacity […]. My Lords, I have to state to day the root of all these Misdemeanors, namely, the pecuniary corruption and avarice (which is a material head) which gave rise and primary motion to all the rest of the delinquincies [sic] which we charge to have been committed by the Governor General. […] I will venture to say there is no one in which tyranny, malice, cruelty and oppression can be charged, that does not at the same time carry evident marks of pecuniary corruption (p. 374).
Not unexpectedly, the orator concludes his tirade by claiming that ‘money is the beginning, the middle and the end of every kind of act done by Mr Hastings, pretendedly for the Company, but really for himself’ (p. 377). Whether the audience sitting in Westminster Hall – or, at least, part of it – found this remark true or plausible can only be guessed. Nonetheless, it may be worth noting that between May and June 1786 The Morning Chronicle, The London Chronicle and The General Evening Post published a list of eleven East India Company employees who had amassed vast fortunes while serving in South Asia. Warren Hastings was named first.65 Even though raising a large personal fortune was never the Governor-General’s primary aim, F. P. Lock has argued that Burke was genuinely convinced that avarice was ‘the leading feature of Hastings’s character’. Lock goes on to suggest that, since avarice is a more degrading vice than ambition, Burke exploited this in order ‘to strip him [Hastings] of his heroic pretentions’.66
The Latin equivalent of avarice, avaritia, is also singled out by Cicero as one of the most distinctive traits of Verres’s personality. The Roman orator refers to the propraetor as to a homo avarissimus (Verr. II.5.87) and argues that numerous outrages committed against the Sicilians were caused by his avaritia.67 Indeed, as much as improbitas, acerbitas, iniuria and nequitia – to name but a few of the governor’s leading features – constitute the pillars of Verres’s government,68 so is Hastings’s dominion over India purportedly founded on corruption and iniquity. In Burke’s words, the Governor-General of Bengal adopted a ‘system of corruption’, making use of ‘wicked, villanous [sic], perfidious means’ (p. 372). Hastings’s regime is hence stigmatized as ‘an Evil System’; ‘so wild, absurd, irrational and wicked a system’; ‘vicious system, which clearly leads to Evil Consequences’ (p. 375). Burke’s implacable attack is reinforced further through several hyperbolic comments: ‘such a body […] of corruption and peculation, in every walk, in every department, in every situation of life, in the sale of the most sacred Trusts, in the destruction of the most ancient families of the Country, as I believe in so short a time never was unveiled since the World began. […] all departments were corrupted and vitiated’ (p. 387); ‘it is the most daring bribery and peculation that ever was’ (p. 399).69
Beasts, monsters and cruel tyrants
The degradation of Verres and Hastings does not stop with their depiction as vicious villains. Both Cicero and Burke choose to characterize their adversaries by identifying them with wild beasts and inhuman monsters. We may note that the propraetor of Sicily – at first an ‘enemy, and […] a most savage and inhuman enemy’ (Verr. II.2.51: hostis, et hostis […] nimis ferus et immanis) – turns into a belua, with Cicero wondering whether the defendant is just a cruel human being (homine crudeli) or a monstrous wild beast (fera atque immani belua).70 Ann Vasaly has, indeed, noted that the turning point in the propraetor’s career ‘is usually an act of great criminality after which point he is depicted as a bestial figure, hated by all and devoid of redeeming characteristics’.71
Similarly, the Anglo-Irish orator equates the Governor-General to ‘a wild beast’. In the speech delivered on 25 April 1789, for example, Burke claimed:
Mr. Hastings feasts in the dark; Mr. Hastings feasts alone; Mr. Hastings feasts like a wild beast; he growls in the corner over the dying and the dead, like the tigers of that country, who drag their pray into the jungles. Nobody knows of it, till he is brought into judgment for the flock he has destroyed.72
Philip Ayres has notably commented on this passage, highlighting its close relationship with the Virgilian underworld: ‘We have entered a world of myth and monstrosity. The imagery is from the sixth book of the Aeneid, the phrasing and rhythms from the Gothic novel’.73 A good sense of how Hastings is portrayed as an animal – in fact, an Indian animal – may be derived from a small appendix contained in Hastings’s own account of the trial, The History of the Trial of Warren Hastings, Esq. Late Governor General of Bengal, … (1796). Significantly entitled Curious Collection of Mr. BURKE’S Abuse of Mr. HASTINGS, this section is composed of ‘extracts from Mr. Burke’s Speeches in several years’.74 Here, owing to his voracity and mortiferous instincts, Hastings is first associated with a rapacious and pitiless vulture: he is ‘not like the generous eagle’ – Burke observed in 1789 – ‘who feeds upon a living, reluctant, equal prey: No; he is like the ravenous vulture, who feeds on the dead, and the enfeebled’.75 It comes as no surprise, then, that the Governor-General is also compared to a ferocious tiger: ‘like a wild beast he [Hastings] groans in a corner over the dead and dying; and like the tyger [sic] of that country, he wishes to withdraw into a cavern, to indulge with unobserved enjoyment in all the wanton caprices of his appetite’.76 ‘I ask and scrutinize’ – Burke thundered in 1794 – ‘what was latent in a tyger [sic]’s heart – what was in a tyger [sic]’s breast to do – and he [Hastings] did’.77
Not only wild beasts, but also monsters appear in the gallery of dehumanized portraits of the Governor-General. According to the Curious Collection, for example, in 1789 Burke compared Hastings to a vampire, who ‘is not satisfied without sucking the blood of 1400 nobles’.78 In the official transcription of Burke’s ‘Speech on the Opening of the Impeachment’, the adjective ‘monstrous’ occurs several times and is always associated with acts of cruelty, bribery and corruption.79 It is tempting to speculate that Burke’s copious use of this term inspired political satirists, including William Dent (1746–1821). In his satirical cartoon entitled The Raree Show (25 February 1788: BM 7273), for instance, Dent portrays Hastings as a gigantic figure in the act of devouring a woman whom he holds in his arms. He is ‘the prodigious monster arrived from the East’, as the caption reads.80
If we look further into the corpus of Burke’s political writings, the noun and adjective ‘monster’ and ‘monstrous’ appear to be particularly relevant in connection to the French revolutionary context.81 Mary Fairclough, for example, argues that Burke employs a ‘rhetoric of demonology […] in order to decry the “monstrosity” of the new French state’.82 Similarly, Paul Youngquist has noted that ‘when Burke speaks of monstrosity, he […] means deviant parts of a social body, Jacobins for instance, ill adapted to function healthfully within the whole organism’.83 Although these remarks are aimed at the Reflections, they may be extended to the orations against Hastings. What emerges clearly in the ‘Speech on the Opening of the Impeachment’, in fact, is that not only did the former Governor-General of Bengal constitute a threat to British order, but also – and above all – represented a menace to ‘the eternal laws of justice’ (p. 275).
Significantly, this was not the first time that the label of ‘monster’ was attached to a British statesman. As J. G. A. Pocock has notably shown, some sixty years before the commencement of the trial of Warren Hastings, Robert Walpole was frequently cast as a ‘monster of corruption’. According to his enemies, Walpole’s unscrupulous politics and corrupt personalities were ‘undermining the moral structure of human society’.84 The Craftsman, in particular, used to criticize the Prime Minister’s voracity by means of images of monsters and giants. And such was the vitriol of the The Craftsman’s attack on Walpole that he was variously described as a ‘monstrous Leviathan’ (15 March 1728–9); ‘the greatest Monster of Power and wickedness that ever infested the Face of the Earth’ (18 May 1728); and a ‘noxious Caterpillar’ (19 June 1731).85
The practice of comparing one’s chief adversaries to beasts and monsters is a traditional strategy, already utilized by Cicero throughout his oratorical career. We should note – as James M. May has highlighted – that ‘in attacking his enemies by portraying them as inhuman, Cicero employs terms that are both generic (e.g. animal, monstrum, portentum, bestia, belua) and particular (e.g., Verres, Scylla, Charybdis)’.86 Cicero’s deliberate use of specific monsters aims ‘to illustrate a particular trait of his enemy’.87 In the Verrines, not only is the propraetor of Sicily repeatedly called monstrum but he is also ultimately identified with the dreadful monsters that populated the island in the mythical imagination.88 Indeed, Verres is infestior (‘more pitiless’) than Scylla and Charybdis and even importunior (‘more brutal’) than the Cyclops Polyphemus:89
I conceive that neither Charybdis nor Scylla was as dangerous as he was to the mariners navigating those straits; he was more dangerous, because he had girt himself about with more numerous and savage hounds. He was a second Cyclops, but far more frightful, for he infested the whole island, while the Cyclops only occupied Aetna and the adjoining regions.90
Closely connected to the imagery of monstrosity is that of tyranny: while the governor of Sicily is repeatedly referred to as a tyrannus, his government is labelled as an imperium tyranni (II.3.25).91 Thus, Cicero strategically alludes to the numerous cruel despots, including Dionysius and Phalaris, who had notoriously ruled Sicily before the Romans, and opines that the propraetor was ‘one of the many cruel tyrants the island once produced’ (II.5.145: tulit enim illa quondam insula multos et crudeles tyrannos).92 Cicero’s portrait of Verres as tyrant has long attracted the attention of critics – Ann Vasaly noting, for example, that Verres possesses ‘the stereotypical traits of the tyrant – greed, lust, cruelty, and impiety’.93 Given the Hellenized environment of the island – wealthy and sophisticated, Sicily was envisaged as an extension of Greece – Catherine Steel has argued that Verres ‘is in some sense Greek’ and that Cicero ‘does exploit the political side of easterness at one point, where he likens Verres to a tyrant (II.3.76)’.94 More recently, Kathryn Tempest has shown how the character of the propraetor, as Cicero describes him, ‘ultimately derives from a range of topoi that are originally Greek’.95
As for Hastings, Burke variously refers to the Governor-General’s misdemeanours as ‘an act of tyranny’ (p. 382) and as ‘tyrannous exactions’ (p. 383). ‘My Lords,’ he solemnly declared on 18 February 1788, ‘when Mr Hastings first went into Bengal, the first of his acts was the most bold and extraordinary that I believe ever entered into the head of any man; I will say, of any tyrant’ (p. 381). Interestingly, the term ‘tyrant’ appears several times also in the Curious Collection. According to this appendix, in the year 1794 Burke referred to Warren Hastings as to ‘a tyrant, an oppressor, and murderer’; a ‘cruel and bloody tyrant’; ‘the captain general of iniquity – thief – tyrant – robber – cheat – sharper – swindler’ (p. 154).
In such a dark scenario, unsurprisingly, both Cicero and Burke place great emphasis on their enemy’s cruelty. Again and again, particularly in the second part of In Verrem II.5, the Roman orator addresses the propraetor’s crudelitas, highlighting the brutal, pitiless nature of Verres’s misdeeds.96 Similarly, Burke focuses on Hastings’s tendency to inflict pain and suffering to others, reiterating the terms ‘cruelty’, ‘cruel’ and ‘cruelly’.97
Examples of the tragic consequences resulting from the Roman governor’s ferocity abound everywhere in the Actio Secunda. Cicero attempts to rouse strong emotions in his audience: pity for Verres’s victims and anger at his arrogance and brutality. Among the charges that are piled up against him, in the third oration (frumentaria or de frumento), Verres is repeatedly accused of expilatio (plunder), vexatio (oppression), and squalor (mourning).98 Similarly, in the fourth (de signis) and fifth (de suppliciis) orations, Cicero conjures up vivid images of the Sicilians’ distress and grief, and accordingly, one of the terms most frequently repeated in de signis is dolor.99 Another strategy Cicero employs to engage the emotions of the audience on the side of the Sicilians is eulogizing the island’s loyalty to Rome and its inhabitants’ sense of duty to men and the gods.100 Sicily is variously praised as ‘the first province to be acquired’, the ‘jewel of the empire’, the ‘storehouse of the Republic’, a source of profit both to those who exploited it from afar and to those Romans who had settled there.101
Just as Cicero highlights the importance of Sicily and the Sicilians to Rome’s economy, so does Burke emphasize how the Indians’ ‘laborious hands’ proved crucial to the British trade system:
These are the hands […] which have for fifteen years furnished the investment for China from which your Lordships and all this auditory and all this Country have every day for these fifteen years made that luxurious meal with which we all commence the day (p. 419).
Here, Burke is referring to tea. At the time, the East India Company had developed a flourishing trade between India and China and most Chinese tea consumed in Britain was purchased with the opium cultivated in India. Rhetorically, this passage serves a number of purposes. First, it exemplifies Burke’s ability to appeal to his spectators through the full force of immediacy: the reference to investments in remote and exotic countries, such as India and China, is aptly followed by an allusion to the everyday ritual of drinking tea. Secondly, it shows how the sympathetic response to the horrors that Burke is about to disclose – ‘the return that the British Government made to those laborious hands’ was, in fact, ‘Cords, hammers, wedges, tortures and maimings’ (p. 419) – involves not only all the spectators (‘your Lordship and all this auditory’) and the entire nation (‘all this Country’), but even the orator himself (‘that luxurious meal with which we all commence the day’).102 In the previous chapter I have emphasized how Burke’s description of the tortures perpetrated at Rangpur aroused crying and fainting among the audience and eventually caused Burke’s indisposition. Likewise, as we shall see, the picture of the effects of Verres’s impious actions on the inhabitants of Henna prompted an emotional response in Cicero himself (hence, we might speculate, in his imagined auditory).103
Vivid descriptions
The question of playing with the emotions of the audience, as another way of identifiying with the speaker’s (feigned) malaise, leads us a step further. So far, I have commented on general resemblances between the Verrines and the ‘Speech on the Opening of the Impeachment’, concentrating particularly on arguments. In what follows I intend to turn to a specific stylistic feature utilized by both orators to enliven their narrative, namely ‘vivid description’. I use this expression to denote – as Beth Innocenti has put it – ‘several related techniques […], all of which involve primarily literal uses of language designed to promote visualization of a scene’.104 Specifically, I shall dwell on one of the most patently emotional moments of the Verrines, the story of Publius Gavius, and shall juxtapose it with the most pathetic, spectacular and successful section of Burke’s ‘Speech on the Opening of the Impeachment’, the account of the Rangpur episode. In order to attempt a methodical analysis, I will follow chiefly Beth Innocenti’s study of vivid description and will extend it both to the Latin and the English texts.105
In antiquity Cicero was considered a master of vivid description. He ‘is outstanding’ (eminet) declared Quintilian, commenting on a passage from the Verrines.106 As a matter of fact, the orations against Verres offer an ample catalogue of examples of Cicero’s able use of this rhetorical technique, as can be easily seen in the episodes of Haluntium and Henna. The anguish and cries following Verres’ request to hand him over all the Corinthian vases and other precious objects possessed by the Haluntini is efficaciously associated with the commotion and grief notoriously aroused by the Trojan horse:107
Picture to yourselves the hurrying to and fro in the town, the cries of grief, and the wailing of the women, too; anyone looking on would have thought that the Trojan horse had been admitted, and that the city was in its enemies’ hands. Here vessels, stripped of their coverings, were being brought out of doors, there they were being torn from women’s resisting hands; in many houses the locks were being wrenched off and the doors burst open.108
Though this description is rather concise, Cicero’s account turns out to be exceptionally intense and dramatic: besides enlivening the narrative by dwelling on general auditory details, such as women’s weeping, the orator arouses pity for the Sicilians and indignation at Verres’s cruelty by interspersing the story with verbs indicating to take away by force, to extort, to wrench off, to open violently (efferri, extorqueri, ecfringi, revelli).
The vividness and emotional narrative power of this episode is paralleled by another ‘miniature drama’, that of Ceres of Henna.109 Cicero is keen to note that so devoted to the cult of Ceres were the citizens of Henna, that they all seemed to be ‘the priests, […] the servants and ministers of Ceres’ (II.4.111: omnes sacerdotes, omnes accolae atque antistites Cereris). The city itself did not look like a simple urbs (town), but rather a fanum Cereris (Ceres’s sanctuary). In such a sacred place, not only did Verres take away the ‘most ancient and sacred’ (II.4.109: antiquissimam, religiosissimam) sculpture of Ceres, but he also seized an exquisite statue of the goddess Victoria, placed on the hand of a gigantic (and as such immovable) statue of Ceres. In order to impress on his audience the misery and sorrow of the Hennenses, Cicero suggests that the whole city seemed to be in mourning (II.4.110: acerbissimus tota urbe luctus versari videretur).110 As in the previous passage, the pathos of the scene is strategically amplified by means of numerous visual and auditory particulars: the orator evokes his arriving in Henna, the gathering of the goddess’s priests (sacerdotes) ‘wearing their fillets and carrying their sacred boughs’ (cum infulis ac verbenis), the people of Henna assembling, crying and moaning.111 Indeed, so animated and detailed is this description that the action seems to unfold before our eyes.
This passage is particularly illuminating for two reasons: first, auditors have the impression of participating in the making of the narration; secondly, the speaker himself explicitly calls attention to his own feelings and reactions. In order to manipulate his audience and win their sympathy, the impassioned orator appears emotionally moved (non solum animo commovear), as well as physically shaken (verum etiam corpore perhorrescam). As the verb perhorrescere demonstrates, the recollection of the inhabitants’ acerbissimus luctus brings about an overwhelming reaction in Cicero’s body. In this respect, it is important to note that the prefix per is an intensifier that strengthens the meaning of the simple verb horrescere, thus suggesting uncontrollable trembling. In a similar way, as I have shown in the previous chapter, Burke was seized by a violent pain in his side after describing the horrors perpetrated at Rangpur.
If Haluntium and Henna are two eminent examples, the most egregious instance of vivid description is represented by the story of Gavius of Consa, a Roman citizen who was crucified in Messana under Verres. Although references to crucifixion in Cicero’s works are legion, John Granger Cook has noticed that the capital punishment inflicted on Gavius is ‘one of the few “nominal” Roman crucifixions […] that have survived in the tradition’.112 Cicero introduces this dramatic episode by confessing that he is unsure whether his oratorical resources will equal the sorrow that Verres’s crimen provokes in his heart. After concluding that no power of language could appropriately describe such an appalling event, the orator decides to avoid eloquentia and to let the bare facts speak for themselves.113 There follows a narration of Gavius’s miserable story: his flight from the Latumiae (Stone Quarries) at Syracuse; his attempt to escape Verres’s jurisdiction by gaining the Italian peninsula; his incautious criticism of the propraetor; his arrest; Verres’s arrival in the Messanan forum; and, finally, the beating, torture and death of Gavius, despite his dramatically repeated cry, civis Romanus sum. The gravity of Gavius’s cruel sentence is a point worth emphasizing. As has been observed, flogging Roman citizens in the first century BC was arguably prohibited – the lex Porcia probably also including ‘the right of appeal against a magistrate’s decision’.114 Throughout his harangue, Cicero forcefully stresses that meting out capital punishment to a Roman citizen is similar to a parricide (prope parricidium).115 In this sense, the propraetor’s cruelty is presented as an attack on Roman security, as is borne out by a number of references, such as in II.5.170: ‘It was not Gavius, not one obscure man, whom you nailed upon that cross of agony: it was the universal principle that Romans are free men’ (Non tu hoc loco Gavium, non unum hominem nescio quem, sed communem libertatis et civitatis causam in illum cruciatum et crucem egisti).116
In Cicero’s hands, the passage dealing with Gavius becomes a powerful cameo, capable of eliciting an emotional response from the audience.117 Significantly, Ann Vasaly has noted that the dramatic strength of this narration is amplified by the orator’s ‘liberal use of all those stylistic features that enliven narrative, especially vivid description’.118 In this sense, it comes as no surprise that Quintilian and Aulus Gellius quote the same passage from the story of Gavius (Verres’s enraged appearance in the Messanan forum)119 as a remarkable example of what Cicero himself called ‘ocular demonstration’ (sub oculos subiectio).120 ‘This’ – Quintilian explains – ‘happens when, instead of stating that an event took place, we show how it took place, and that not as a whole, but in detail’.121 Similarly, Aulus Gellius attests to the Roman orator’s ability to exhibit a scene with such extreme vividness that ‘you do not seem to hear the act described, but to see it acted before your face’.122
Much in the same way, as I have observed in Chapter 3, Burke evokes the horrors purportedly committed at Rangpur with extraordinary particularity. Aiming to conjure up appalling scenes of suffering in front of the assembled peerage and his sophisticated audience, the Anglo-Irish orator dwells on shocking visual details, such as the tormentors’ furious beatings of their victims with bamboo canes or the victims’ blood running ‘out of their mouths, eyes and noses’:
The Heads of villages, the parochial Magistrates, the leading Yeomen of the country, respectable for their situation, and their age, were taken and tied together by the feet, two and two, thrown over a bar, and there beaten with bamboo canes upon the sole of their feet until their nails started from their toes. And then, falling upon them, while their heads hung down as their feet were above, with sticks and cudgels, their tormentators attacked them with such blind fury that the blood ran out of their mouths, eyes and noses. (p. 419).
This passage is especially significant because the scene it evokes is rendered with graphic clarity and the full force of immediacy, as if it were unfolding before the eyes of an observer.
Although the visual nature of the horrific scenes in the Rangpur speech drew on classical rhetorical features, it was also profoundly indebted to the spectacular tendencies of the contemporary representation of violence. As Ian Haywood reminds us, ‘spectacular violence was a vital and indelible component of those two foundational discourses of Romanticism: sensibility and the sublime’.123 In a period when ‘spectacular violence brought the excesses of imperial violence and suffering into the heart of British culture’ – Haywood continues – ‘Romantic readers were prodigious consumers of spectacular violence’.124 Examples of what Haywood calls ‘spectacular violence’ can also be traced in the extraordinary mass of representations of tortures and violence perpetrated against the slaves, such as, notably, William Blake’s engravings for John Gabriel Stedman’s Narrative of a Five Years’ Expedition against the Negroes of Suriname (1796).125 Indeed, the whole section of the Rangpur speech is fraught with detailed descriptions of tortures or – in Kate Teltscher’s words – ‘scenes of extreme horrors’,126 including hands and feet beaten and maimed; nipples ripped from breasts; and bodies whipped, scourged and plunged into cold water in winter time.
As these examples indicate, vivid descriptions may also insist on movement – in the aforementioned passage, the victims are bound together, thrown over a bar and beaten ferociously (not to mention their nails starting from their feet and their copious bleeding). If we take the story of Gavius, movement is present when Verres orders the civis Romanus ‘to be flung down, stripped naked and tied up in the open market-place, and rods to be got ready’ (Verr. II.5.161: repente hominem proripi atque in foro medio nudari ac deligari et virgas expediri iubet), or when the Roman citizen ‘was beaten with rods’ (II.5.162: Caedebatur virgis).127
In addition to sight and movement, vivid descriptions rely also on auditory details: sounds, such as weeping and moaning (as in the cases of Haluntium and Henna) can be used effectively to arouse sentiments of pity and indignation.128 Cicero’s strategic handling of Gavius’s story includes at least two passages where specific auditory details stir strong emotions in the audience, sympathy for the unfortunate protagonist and indignation at Verres’s cruelty. In the first case, Gavius’s beating is accompanied by the ‘crack of the falling blows’ and the protagonist’s agonized, repeated cry Civis Romanus sum;129 in the second instance, Cicero accuses Verres of indifference both to the ‘pitiful cries’ (II.5.163: imploratio et vox miserabilis) and to ‘the tears and the loud groans of the Roman citizens who then stood by’ (II.5.163: civium quidem Romanorum qui tum aderant fletu et gemitu maximo).
The same is true of Burke. In his brief account of the violation of Indian virgins, the Anglo-Irish orator concentrates on perturbing sounds, such as ‘shrieks’, ‘cries’ and ‘groans’:
There in the presence of day, in the public Court, vainly invoking its justice, while their shrieks were mingled with the cries and groans of an indignant people, those virgins were cruelly violated by the basest and wickedest of mankind (pp. 420–1).130
This passage appears to be important for at least two other reasons. First, Burke explicitly sets the scene in broad daylight (‘in the presence of day’), in a public place (‘the public Court’), in front of the public gaze.131 In this respect, it conforms to Innocenti’s claim that ‘Virtually all vivid descriptions include the presence of a crowd of people’. Indeed, not only does the presence of a large number of people lend ‘credibility and plausibility to the scene being vividly described’, but it also ‘may be designed to arouse indignation by signifying the public nature of an act’.132 This is also the case with the beating of Gavius, which is set in medio foro Messanae, in the presence of Roman citizens (Verr. II.5.162–3).
Secondly, we may also note that, in order to summon sympathy for, or to promote identification with, the actors in a scene, both orators emphasize crimes perpetrated against parents and children, husbands and wives. The Indian women violated at Rangpur were either ‘Virgins whose fathers kept them from the sight of the sun’ (p. 420) or ‘the wives of the people of the country’ (p. 421). Further examples include ‘innocent children’ who ‘were cruelly scourged, both male and female, in the presence of their parents’ (p. 420), or sons and fathers bound and whipped together.133
Similarly, throughout the Verrines Cicero attempts to amplify the emotional impact of his narration by referring to the violations of married women (matres familias violatas, Verr. II.4.116) and the executions of innocent sons and fathers. The most notorious instance of such mistreatment is perhaps the unjust death sentence inflicted on Philodamus and his son:
In the forum of Laodicea a cruel scene was enacted, which caused all the province of Asia profound unhappiness and distress: here the aged father led forth to execution, and there his son: the one for defending the purity of his children, the other for saving his father’s life and sister’s honour. Both wept, but neither for his own doom: the father for his son’s fate, the son for his father’s.134
Indeed, since antiquity Cicero was renowned as a creator of narratives that elicited empathic feelings by means of vivifying words. Quintilian refers to this scene as an example of the orator’s ability to ‘fan the flame of indignation throughout his account, and fill our eyes with tears’ when he ‘describes, or rather sets before our eyes, the father weeping for his son’s death and the son for his father’s’.135 ‘What more pitiful effect’ – the author of the Institutio Oratoria concludes – ‘could any Epilogue produce?’136
In spite of the undoubted similarities between Cicero’s and Burke’s recourse to sympathy, Burke’s ‘appealing to his audience’s native impulse to sympathize with affliction’, to use Richard Bourke’s expression, had a further aim, that is to say making Indian victims and remote suffering seem somehow familiar to the audience sitting in Westminster Hall.137 While Sicily was, in fact, relatively close to Rome – in order to collect evidence against Verres, Cicero went to the island and made (or so he claims) an almost complete tour of it in fifty days138 – to a British audience, India was a far away, exotic land. This should not be surprising, considering that at the end of the eighteenth century it took several months to reach Indian shores from England.
From this perspective, Cicero and Burke appear to differ significantly. On the one hand, the Roman orator must have devoted a considerable amount of energy and physical effort to his condensed tour of Sicily, as he incessantly stresses in the Actio Prima, through the repetition of the personal pronoun ego, ‘I’ (normally omitted in Latin) and the possessive adjective meus, ‘my’.139 On the other, as I mentioned in Chapter 2, the Anglo-Irish orator never visited the Indian subcontinent. And yet he is very keen on emphasizing his capacity to gather a body of evidence ‘such as cannot leave the least doubt […] of the facts’ (p. 276). As much as Cicero draws attention to his own persona, so does Burke highlight his personal ability to collect substantial evidence against Hastings, in spite of the latter’s influence and powerful position:
My Lords, when we consider the late enormous power of the prisoner; when we consider the criminal and indefatigable assiduity in the destruction of evidence; when we consider the power that he had over all testimony, I believe your Lordships, and I believe the world, will be astonished that so much, so clear, so solid, and so conclusive a body of evidence has been obtained against him (p. 276).
No less importantly, Cicero informs his audience that he will prosecute the propraetor of Sicily ‘by means of documents and witnesses, the written statements and official pronouncements of private persons and public bodies’.140 In Burke’s own words, the documentary proofs against the Governor-General include ‘evidence of record, of weighty official, authentic record, and signed by the hand of the criminal himself in many instances’, as well as Hastings’s ‘own letters, authenticated by his own hand’ (p. 276). These written documents are complemented by ‘numbers of oral living witnesses, competent to speak to the points to which they are brought’ (p. 276).141
Though there are certainly many more similarities between Cicero’s In Verrem and Burke’s ‘Speech on the Opening of the Impeachment’, what we have seen so far is ample evidence of the relationship between the Roman and the Anglo-Irish orator, as well as of their use of shared rhetorical strategies. Cicero and his Verrines certainly inspired Burke in many ways, including the latter’s arguments and stylistic features. The Anglo-Irish orator was also influenced by classical rhetorical practices which recommended that the speaker should exhibit rather than stylize and present rather than represent.