Imperium

Finally we turned southeast toward the sea again, into the fertile plains below Mount Aetna. This was state-owned land, administered on behalf of the Roman treasury by a revenue-collection company, which in turn awarded leases to local farmers. When Cicero had first been on the island, the plains of Leontini had been the granary of Rome. But now we drove past deserted farmhouses and gray, untended fields, punctuated by drifting columns of brown smoke, where the homeless former tenants now lived in the open. Verres and his friends in the tax company had fa

Syracuse is by far the largest and fairest of Sicily’s cities. It is four towns, really, which have merged into one. Three of these-Achradina, Tycha, and Neapolis-have spread themselves around the harbor, and in the center of this great natural bay sits the fourth, known simply as the Island, the ancient royal seat, which is linked to the others by a bridge. This walled city-within-a-city, forbidden at night to Sicilians, is where the Roman governor has his palace, close by the great temples of Diana and Minerva. We had feared a hostile reception, given that Syracuse was said to be second only to Messana in its loyalty to Verres, and its senate had recently voted him a eulogy. In fact, the opposite was the case. News of Cicero’s honesty and diligence had preceded him, and we were escorted through the Agrigentine Gate by a crowd of cheering citizens. (One reason for Cicero’s popularity was that, as a young magistrate, he had located in the overgrown municipal cemetery the 130-year-old lost tomb of the mathematician Archimedes, the greatest man in the history of Syracuse. Typically, he had read somewhere that it was marked by a cylinder and a sphere, and once he had found the monument, he paid to have the weeds and brambles cleared away. He had then spent many hours beside it, pondering the transience of human glory. His generosity and respect had not been forgotten by the local population.)

But to resume: we were lodged in the home of a Roman knight, Lucius Flavius, an old friend of Cicero’s, who had plenty of stories of Verres’s corruption and cruelty to add to our already bulging stock. There was the tale of the pirate captain, Heracleo, who had been able to sail right into Syracuse at the head of a squadron of four small galleys, pillage the warehouses, and leave without encountering any resistance. Captured some weeks later, farther up the coast at Megara, neither he nor his men had been paraded as prisoners, and there were rumors that Verres had exchanged him for a large ransom. Then there was the horrible business of a Roman banker from Spain, Lucius Here

That night, after di

“It is a trap,” said Lucius, “to make you panic, and cut short your expedition here.”

“Probably so,” agreed Cicero. “But I ca

“So what are we going to do?”

“We have wasted too much time pursuing the small fry in this investigation,” said Cicero. “We need to take the war into the enemy’s camp and loosen some tongues among those who really know what has been going on-the Romans themselves.”

“I agree,” said Lucius. “The question is: how?”

Cicero glanced around and lowered his voice before replying. “We shall carry out a raid,” he a

Even Lucius looked slightly green at that. Short of marching up to the governor’s palace and attempting to arrest Metellus, this was the most provocative gesture Cicero could make. The revenue collectors were a syndicate of well-co

Cicero now had to make his preparations with great speed and secrecy. He deliberately timed his raid to take place two days hence, at the least-expected hour-just before dawn on a major public holiday, Terminalia. The fact that this was a day sacred to Terminus, the ancient god of boundaries and good neighbors, only made it more symbolically attractive. Flavius, our host, agreed to come with us, to point out the location of the offices. In the interim, I went down to the harbor in Syracuse and found the trusty skipper I had used years before, when Cicero made his ill-judged return to Italy; hired a ship and crew; and told him to be ready to sail before the end of the week. The evidence we had already collected was packed in trunks and stowed aboard, and the ship was placed under guard.

None of us got much sleep on the night of the raid. In the darkness before dawn we positioned our hired oxcarts at either end of the street to block it, and when Cicero gave the signal we all jumped out carrying our torches. The senator hammered on the door, stood aside without waiting for a reply, and a couple of our burliest attendants took their axes to it. The instant it yielded, we poured into the passage, knocking aside the elderly night watchman, and secured the company’s records. We quickly formed a human chain-Cicero, too-and passed the boxes of wax tablets and papyrus rolls from hand to hand, out into the street and onto our carts.

I learned one valuable lesson that day: if you seek popularity, there is no surer way of achieving it than by raiding a syndicate of tax collectors. As the sun rose and news of our activity spread, an enthusiastic honor guard of Syracusans formed themselves around us, more than large enough to deter the director of the company, Carpinatius, when he arrived to reoccupy the building with a detachment of legio

In all, we must have transported more than four cartloads of records back to the house of Flavius. We locked the gates, posted sentries, and then began the wearying business of sorting through them. Even now, remembering the size of the task that confronted us, I find myself starting to break into a sweat of apprehension. These records, which went back years, not only covered all the state land on Sicily, but also itemized every farmer’s number and quality of grazing animals, and every crop he had ever sown, its size and yield. Here were details of loans issued and taxes paid and correspondence entered into. And it quickly became clear that other hands had already been through this mass of material and removed every trace of Verres’s name. A furious message arrived from the governor’s palace, demanding that Cicero appear before Metellus when the courts reopened the following day, to answer a writ from Carpinatius that he return the documents. Meanwhile, a crowd had gathered outside and was chanting Cicero’s name. At that moment Terentia’s prediction that she and her husband would be ostracized by Rome and end their days as consul and first lady of Thermae seemed more prescient. Only Cicero retained his cool. He had represented enough shady revenue collectors to know most of their tricks. Once it became apparent that the files specifically relating to Verres had been excised, he dug out an old list of all the company’s managers and hunted through it until he came to the name of the firm’s financial director during the period of Verres’s governorship.

“I shall tell you one thing, Tiro,” he said. “I have never come across a financial director yet who did not keep an extra set of records for himself when he handed over to his successor, just to be on the safe side.”

And with that we set off on our second raid of the morning.

Our quarry was a man named Vibius, who was at that moment celebrating Terminalia with his neighbors. They had set up an altar in the garden and there was some corn upon it, also some honeycombs and wine, and Vibius had just sacrificed a suckling pig. (“Very pious, these crooked accountants,” observed Cicero.) When he saw the senator bearing down upon him, he looked a little like a suckling pig himself, but once he had read the warrant, with Glabrio’s praetorian seal attached to it, he reluctantly decided there was nothing he could do except cooperate. Excusing himself from his bemused guests, he led us inside to his tablinum and opened up his strongbox. Among the title deeds, account books, and jewelry, there was a little packet of letters marked “Verres,” and his face, as Cicero broke it open, was one of utter terror. I guess he must have been told to destroy it and had either forgotten or had thought to make some profit out of it.