Imperium: Read online

  ‘It’s a trap,’ declared Lucius immediately, ‘to make you panic, and cut short your expedition here.’

  ‘Probably so,’ agreed Cicero. ‘But I can’t afford to take the risk. If this other prosecution slips into the court’s schedule ahead of ours, and if Hortensius spins it out as he likes to do, our case could be pushed back until after the elections. By then Hortensius and Quintus Metellus will be consuls-elect. That youngest Metellus brother will no doubt be a praetor-elect, and this third will still be governor here. How will that be for having the odds stacked against us?’

  ‘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 announced. ‘A raid on the offices of the revenue collectors.’

  Even Lucius looked slightly green at that, for short of marching up to the governor’s palace and attempting to arrest Metellus, this was about the most provocative gesture Cicero could make. The revenue collectors were a syndicate of well-connected men, of equestrian rank, operating under statutory protection, whose investors would certainly include some of the wealthiest senators in Rome. Cicero himself, as a specialist in commercial law, had built up a network of supporters among exactly this class of businessman. He knew it was a risky strategy, but he was not to be dissuaded, for it was here, he was sure, that the dark heart of Verres’s murderous corruption was to be found. He sent the messenger back to Rome that same night with a letter for Quintus, announcing that he had only one more thing left to do, and that he would depart from the island within a few days.

  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 is the day sacred to Terminus, the ancient god of boundaries and good neighbours, only made it more symbolically attractive as far as he was concerned. Flavius, our host, agreed to come with us to point out the location of the offices. In the interim, I went down to the harbour in Syracuse and found the same trusty skipper I had used years before, when Cicero made his ill-judged return to Italy. From him I 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. 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 ox-carts 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 through into the passage, knocking aside the elderly nightwatchman, 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 on to the back of our carts.

  I learned one valuable lesson that day, which is that if you seek popularity, there is no surer way of achieving it than raiding a syndicate of tax collectors. As the sun rose and news of our activity spread through the neighbourhood, an enthusiastic honour 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 legionaries lent to him for the purpose by Lucius Metellus. He and Cicero fell into a furious argument in the middle of the road, Carpinatius insisting that provincial tax records were protected by law from seizure, Cicero retorting that his warrant from the extortion court overrode such technicalities. In fact, as Cicero conceded afterwards, Carpinatius was right. ‘But,’ he added, ‘he who controls the street controls the law’ – and on this occasion, at least, it was Cicero who controlled the street.

  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 itemised 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 the name of Verres. 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, yet another large crowd had started gathering outside and was chanting Cicero’s name. I thought of Terentia’s prediction, that her husband and she would be ostracised by Rome and end their days as consul and first lady of Thermae, and never did a prophecy seem more prescient than at that moment. Only Cicero retained his cool. He had represented enough shady revenue collectors in his time 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’ll tell you one thing, Tiro,’ he said to me. ‘I have never come across a financial director yet who didn’t 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 neighbours. They had set up an altar in the garden and there was some grain upon it, also some honeycombs and wine, and Vibius had just sacrificed a sucking pig. (‘Always very pious, these crooked accountants,’ observed Cicero.) When he saw the senator bearing down upon him, he looked a little like a sucking pig himself, but once he had read the warrant, which had 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 jewellery, there was a little packet of letters marked ‘Verres’, and as Cicero broke it open, Vibius’s face bore an expression 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.

  At first sight, it was nothing much – merely some correspondence from a tax inspector, Lucius Canuleius, who was responsible for collecting export duty on all goods passing through Syracuse harbour. The letters concerned one particular shipment of goods which had left Syracuse two years before, and upon which Verres had failed to pay any tax. The details were attached: four hundred casks of honey, fifty dining room couches, two hundred chandeliers and ninety bales of Maltese cloth. Another prosecutor might not have spotted the significance, but Cicero saw it at once.

  ‘Take a look at that,’ he said, handing it to me. ‘These are not goods seized from a number of unfortunate individuals. Four hundred casks of honey? Ninety bales of foreign cloth?’ He turned his furious gaze on the hapless Vibius. ‘This is a cargo, isn’t it? Your Governor Verres must have stolen a ship.’

  Poor Vibius never stood a chance. Glancing nervously over his shoulder at his bewildered guests, who were staring open-mouthed in our direction, he confirmed that this was indeed a ship’s cargo, and that Canuleius had been instructed never again to attempt to levy tax on any of the governor’s exports.

  ‘How many more such shipments d
id Verres make?’ demanded Cicero.

  ‘I am not sure.’

  ‘Guess then.’

  ‘Ten,’ said Vibius fearfully. ‘Perhaps twenty.’

  ‘And no duty was ever paid? No records kept?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And where did Verres acquire all these cargoes?’ demanded Cicero.

  Vibius was almost swooning with terror. ‘Senator, please …’

  ‘I shall have you arrested,’ said Cicero. ‘I shall have you transported to Rome in chains. I shall break you on the witness stand before a thousand spectators in the Forum Romanum and feed what’s left of you to the dogs of the Capitoline Triad.’

  ‘From ships, Senator,’ said Vibius, in a little mouse voice. ‘They came from ships.’

  ‘What ships? Ships from where?’

  ‘From everywhere, Senator. Asia. Syria. Tyre. Alexandria.’

  ‘So what happened to these ships? Did Verres have them impounded?’

  ‘Yes, Senator.’

  ‘On what grounds?’

  ‘Spying.’

  ‘Ah, spying! Of course! Did ever a man,’ said Cicero to me, ‘root out so many spies as our vigilant Governor Verres? So tell us,’ he said, turning back to Vibius, ‘what became of the crews of these spy ships?’

  ‘They were taken to the Stone Quarries, Senator.’

  ‘And what happened to them then?’

  He made no reply.

  THE STONE QUARRIES was the most fearsome prison in Sicily, probably the most fearsome in the world – at any rate, I never heard of a worse one. It was six hundred feet long and two hundred wide, gouged deep into the solid rock of that fortified plateau known as Epipolae, which overlooks Syracuse from the north. Here, in this hellish pit, from which no scream could carry, exposed without protection to the burning heat of summer and the cold downpours of winter, tormented by the cruelty of their guards and the debased appetites of their fellow prisoners alike, the victims of Verres suffered and died.

  Cicero, with his notorious aversion to military life, was often charged with cowardice by his enemies, and certainly he was prone to nerves and squeamishness. But I can vouch that he was brave enough that day. He went back to our headquarters and collected Lucius, leaving young Frugi behind to continue his search of the tax records. Then, armed only with our walking sticks and the warrant issued by Glabrio, and followed by the now-usual crowd of Syracusans, we climbed the steep path to Epipolae. As always, the news of Cicero’s approach and the nature of his mission had preceded him, and the captain of the guard, after receiving a withering harangue from the senator, threatening all manner of dire repercussions if his demands were not met, allowed us to pass through the perimeter wall and on to the plateau. Once inside, refusing to heed warnings that it was too dangerous, Cicero insisted on being allowed to inspect the Quarries himself.

  This vast dungeon, the work of Dionysius the Tyrant, was already more than three centuries old. An ancient metal door was unlocked and we proceeded into the mouth of a tunnel, guided by prison guards who carried burning torches. The glistening walls, cankerous with lime and fungi, the scuttling of the rats in the shadows, the stench of death and waste, the cries and groans of the abandoned souls – truly this was a descent into Hades. Eventually we came to another massive door, and when this was unlocked and unbolted we stepped on to the floor of the prison. What a spectacle greeted our eyes! It was as if some giant had filled a sack with hundreds of manacled men and had then tipped them out into a hole. The light was weak, almost subaquatic, and everywhere, as far as one could see, there were prisoners. Some shuffled about, a few huddled in groups, but most lay apart from their fellows, mere yellowing sacks of bones. The day’s corpses had not yet been cleared, and it was hard to distinguish the living skeletons from the dead.

  We picked our way among the bodies – those who had already died, and those whose end had yet to come: there was no discernible difference – and occasionally Cicero stopped and asked a man his name, bending to catch the whispered reply. We found no Romans, only Sicilians. ‘Is any man here a Roman citizen?’ he demanded loudly. ‘Have any of you been taken from ships?’ There was silence. He turned and called for the captain of the watch and demanded to see the prison records. Like Vibius, the wretch struggled between fear of Verres and fear of the special prosecutor, but eventually he succumbed to Cicero’s pressure.

  Built into the rock walls of the quarry were separate special cells and galleries, where torture and execution were done, and where the guards ate and slept. (The favoured method of execution, we discovered afterwards, was the garrotte.) Here, too, was housed the administration of the prison, such as it was. Boxes of damp and musty rolls were fetched out for us, containing long lists of prisoners’ names, with the dates of their arrival and departure. Some men were recorded as having been released, but against most was scratched the Sicilian word edikaiothesan – meaning ‘the death penalty was inflicted upon them’.

  ‘I want a copy of every entry for the three years when Verres was governor,’ Cicero said to me, ‘and you,’ he said to the prison captain, ‘when it is done, will sign a statement to say that we have made a true likeness.’

  While I and the other two secretaries set to work, Cicero and Lucius searched through the records for Roman names. Although the majority of those held in the Quarries during Verres’s time were obviously Sicilian, there was also a considerable proportion of races from all across the Mediterranean – Spaniards, Egyptians, Syrians, Cilicians, Cretans, Dalmatians. When Cicero asked why they had been imprisoned, he was told they were pirates – pirates and spies. All were recorded as having been put to death, among them the infamous pirate captain Heracleo. The Romans, on the other hand, were officially described as ‘released’ – including the two men from Spain, Publius Gavius and Lucius Herennius, whose executions had been described to us.

  ‘These records are a nonsense,’ said Cicero quietly to Lucius, ‘the very opposite of the truth. No one saw Heracleo die, although the spectacle of a pirate on the cross invariably draws an enthusiastic crowd. But plenty saw the Romans executed. It looks to me as though Verres simply switched the two about – killed the innocent ships’ crews and freed the pirates, no doubt on payment of a fat ransom. If Gavius and Herennius had discovered his treachery, that would explain why Verres had been so anxious to kill them quickly.’

  I thought poor Lucius was going to be sick. He had surely come a long way from his philosophy books in sunlit Rome to find himself studying death lists by the guttering light of candles, eighty feet beneath the dripping earth. We finished as quickly as we could, and never have I been more glad to escape from anywhere than I was to climb the tunnel out of the Stone Quarries and rejoin humanity on the surface. A slight breeze had sprung up, blowing in across the sea, and I remember as if it were this afternoon rather than an afternoon more than half a century ago the way we all instinctively turned our faces to it and gratefully drank in the taste of that cold clear air.

  ‘Promise me,’ said Lucius after a while, ‘that if ever you achieve this imperium you desire so much, you will never preside over cruelty and injustice such as this.’

  ‘I swear it,’ replied Cicero. ‘And if ever, my dear Lucius, you should question why good men forsake philosophy to seek power in the real world, promise me in return that you will always remember what you witnessed in the Stone Quarries of Syracuse.’

  BY THIS TIME it was late afternoon, and Syracuse, thanks to Cicero’s activities, was in a tumult. The crowd which had followed us up the steep slope to the prison was still waiting for us outside the walls of Epipolae. Indeed, it had grown larger, and had been joined by some of the most distinguished citizens of the city, among them the chief priest of Jupiter, all dressed up in his sacred robes. This pontificate, traditionally reserved for the highest-ranking Syracusan, was presently held by none other than Cicero’s client, Heraclius, who had returned privately from Rome to help us – at considerable personal risk. He came with a request that Cicero s
hould immediately accompany him to the city’s senate chamber, where the elders were waiting to give him a formal civic welcome. Cicero was in two minds. He had much work to do, and not long left to do it, and it was undoubtedly a breach of protocol for a Roman senator to address a local assembly without the permission of the governor. However, it also promised to be a wonderful opportunity to further his enquiries. After a short hesitation, he agreed to go, and we duly set off on foot back down the hill with a huge escort of respectful Sicilians.

  The senate chamber was packed. Beneath a gilded statue of Verres himself, the house’s most senior senator, the venerable Diodorus, welcomed Cicero in Greek, and apologised for the fact that they had so far offered him no assistance: not until the events of today had they truly believed he was in earnest. Cicero, also speaking in Greek, and fired up by the scenes he had just witnessed, then proceeded to make a most brilliant off-the-cuff speech, in which he promised to dedicate his life to righting the injustices done to the people of Sicily. At the end of it, the Syracusan senators voted almost unanimously to rescind their eulogy to Verres (which they swore they had only agreed to after being pressured into it by Metellus). Amid loud cheers, several younger members threw ropes around the neck of Verres’s statue and pulled it down, while others – more importantly – fetched out of the senate’s own secret archives a wealth of new evidence which they had been collecting about Verres’s crimes. These outrages included the theft of twenty-seven priceless portraits from the Temple of Minerva – even the highly decorated doors of the sanctuary had been carried away! – as well as details of all the bribes Verres had demanded to bring in ‘not guilty’ verdicts when he was a judge.