An enraged Verres contrived to have Sthenius taken to court to face a false accusation of forgery. Deeming discretion the better part of valor, the Sicilian fled abroad and was given a heavy fine of 500,000 sesterces in absentia. This was not good enough for Verres, who then arranged to have a capital charge laid against him. Sthenius soon appeared in Rome, where he had many connections, to air his grievance. An official complaint was to be put before the Senate, but Verres’s father arranged for it to be withdrawn after giving assurances that his son would be persuaded to relent. In spite of this, Verres went ahead with his case and brought in a conviction.
Such was the situation in late 71 when the delegation from Sicily called on Pompey, then Consul-Elect, to ask for his help. They also made contact with Cicero, who now counted Sicilians on his client list, and asked him to bring a case of extortion against Verres. This was the only legal remedy available to them, for they were not allowed to plead in court themselves and were obliged to find a Roman lawyer to act on their behalf. The young Quaestor’s friendliness and lack of bias were not forgotten—nor the forensic skills he had demonstrated during his Sicilian posting. Although not yet acknowledged as the leader of his profession, he was an obviously rising star and seemed a sound choice.
Throughout his career Cicero usually represented the defense; this was one of the rare occasions when he prosecuted. The conventions of clientship gave him little option but to agree to do so. He may have calculated that his involvement in such a high-profile event would do no harm to his chances when he stood for Aedile in the summer of 70, the next lap in the Honors Race. Aediles reported to the Consuls, on whose behalf they exercised various administrative duties in Rome; these included looking after the grain supply, the control of markets, streets and traffic and the prosecution of offenders against moneylending laws. They were also responsible for staging public shows and games. (There were two kinds of Aedile: Plebeian, open only to the popular classes, and Curule, for which both Plebeians and Patricians were entitled to stand; Cicero probably ran for the former.)
Verres and his friends in the Senate were uneasy. His counsel was the best that could be found: Quintus Hortensius Hortalus. Eight years older than Cicero, he was a virtuoso of an elaborate “Asiatic” (as it was called) style of oratory, and the most celebrated member of the Roman bar. In case this was not enough to win an acquittal, steps were taken to sabotage the proceedings in various ways. First, an attempt was made to prevent Cicero from appearing at all. There being no state prosecution service, anyone could bid to take on a case; a friend of Verres, who had once been his Quaestor, volunteered to prosecute him—with the clear intention of pulling his punches and so reducing the risk of conviction. Also, if possible, he would drag out the trial till the following year, when a number of Verres’s friends would probably be assuming important official positions. (Hortensius, for example, was running for Consul.)
So a preliminary hearing had to be held to determine which of the competing advocates had priority. Cicero won the decision and then asked for a stay of trial for 110 days so that he could collect evidence and recruit witnesses. He traveled to Sicily with his cousin Lucius in the depths of an unusually harsh winter and began his investigations. The current governor of Sicily was Lucius Caecilius Metellus, a friend of Verres and a member of one of Rome’s most aristocratic clans. His good offices, supplemented by the recycling of some of Verres’s ill-gotten gains back to Sicily in the form of bribes, hindered Cicero’s detective work. Local communities were unexpectedly reluctant to appoint delegations to attend the trial. Although Cicero was entitled to ask for documents, they were not always produced. Witnesses became mysteriously unavailable for questioning.
Cicero was undeterred, tracking people down to remote cottages or fields where they were working at the plow. He completed his inquiries in fifty days and, after a trying, storm-tossed voyage in a small boat, was back in Rome for the summer well before his deadline was up.
An unpleasant surprise awaited him. The case had been delayed by the specious interposition of another trial and was now unlikely to take place before August. This was a serious blow, for there were very few fasti days between August and mid-November when trials could be heard. This was partly because of the large number of regular holidays and festivals, but also because Pompey was planning some additional games to celebrate his Spanish victory.
Worse was to come. Hortensius and Quintus Caecilius Metellus Creticus, Verres’s patron, won the Consular elections for the following year, 69, and a few days later yet another Metellus was elected Praetor, with responsibility for the extortion court before which Cicero would be appearing. On top of that, a fourth Metellus was appointed to follow his brother as governor of Sicily. The only good news was that an attempt to prevent Cicero from being elected as Aedile was decisively thwarted. In fact, he scored a notable success, leading his competitors by a large majority.
From Verres’s point of view, the battle seemed to be won before it started. Taken overall, the election results were almost as good as an acquittal and congratulations began to pour in. Of course, it would be necessary to put up with the formality of trial, but a formality was all it was expected to be. When proceedings opened in the Forum on August 4, the accused man had reason to feel optimistic.
Cicero thought hard about the tactics he should use in court. He knew that the evidence he had assembled was detailed and robust, but he had to find a way of preventing the case from trickling desultorily through the autumn into the new year. He decided to launch a surprise attack. Roman trials usually began with long addresses by the advocates. With permission from the presiding Praetor, Cicero gave up the opportunity for time-consuming oratorical display and, after a brief introduction detailing Verres’s delaying tactics, proceeded directly to the evidence itself. He showed methodically, and with full reference to witnesses and documents, that during his three years in Sicily Verres had amassed the enormous sum of 40 million sesterces.
“Today the eyes of the world are upon you,” Cicero told the jurors, fearing that they would allow themselves to be suborned. “This man’s case will establish whether a jury composed exclusively of Senators can possibly convict someone who is very guilty—and very rich. Let me add that because the defendant is the kind of man who is distinguished by nothing except his criminality and his wealth, the only imaginable explanation for an acquittal will be the one that brings the greatest discredit to you. No one will believe that anybody likes Verres, or that he is related to any of you, or that he has behaved well in other aspects of his life, no, nor even that he is moderate in his faults. No such excuses can extenuate the number and scale of his offenses.”
It was crucial that Cicero finish his presentation before the court went into recess with the opening of Pompey’s games on August 16. In the event, he managed to set out his material expeditiously as well as comprehensively. On August 13 he rested his case.
Cicero’s coup was devastating for the defense and had immediate consequences. Clearly, it was no longer feasible for Verres and his friends to try to keep the trial going indefinitely. Far more serious, though, was Hortensius’s reaction. He was appalled by what he had heard and his sense of having been ambushed by Cicero magnified the impact of the evidence. He withdrew from the case without saying a word in response. Verres drew the inevitable conclusion and left at once for Massilia (in Transalpine Gaul) and a lifetime of exile. He was able to take his fortune with him, for he was as yet unconvicted, and so did not have to sacrifice his extorted comforts.