In C. Verrem

It is a custom of the Sicilians, and of the rest of the Greeks, because they wish their days and months to agree with the calculations as to the sun and moon, if there be any difference sometimes to take out a day, or, at most, two days from a month, which they call e)caire/simoi. And so also they sometimes make a month longer by a day or by two days. And when he heard of that, he, this new astronomer, who was thinking not so much of the heavens as of the heavy plate, [*](The original puns on the resemblance between caelum, “heaven,” and caelatum, “carved” or “chased.”) he orders (not a day to be taken out of the month, but) a month and a half to be taken out of the year; so that the day which, as one may say, ought to have been the thirteenth of January, became the first of March. And that is done in spite of the remonstrances and indignation of every one. That was the legitimate day for holding the comitia. On that day Climachias is declared to have been elected priest.

When Herodotus returns from Rome, fifteen days, as he supposed, before the comitia, he comes on the month of the comitia, when the comitia have been held thirty days before. Then the people of Cephalaedium voted an intercalary month of forty-five days, in order that the rest of the months might fall again into their proper season. If these things could be done at Rome, no doubt he would somehow or other have contrived to have the forty-five days between the two sets of games taken away, during which days alone this trial could take place.

But now it is worth while to see how the censors were appointed in Sicily while that man was praetor. For that is the magistracy among the Sicilians, the appointments to which are made by the people with the greatest care, because all the Sicilians pay a yearly tax in proportion to their incomes; and, in making the census, the power is entrusted to the censor of making every sort of valuation, and of determining the total amount of every man's contribution. Therefore the people choose with the greatest care the man in whom they can place the greatest confidence in a matter affecting their own property; and on account of the greatness of the power, this magistracy is an object of the greatest ambition.

In such a matter, Verres did not choose to do any thing obscurely, nor to play tricks in the drawing of lots, nor to take days out of the calendar. He did not choose to do anything in an underhand manner, or by means of artifice; but in order to take away the fondness and desire for honours and ambition out of every city, feelings which usually tend to the ruin of a state, he declared that he should appoint the censors in every city.

When the praetor announced so vast a scene of bargaining and trafficking as that, people came to Syracuse to see him, from all quarters. The whole of the praetor's house was on fire with the eagerness and cupidity of men; and no wonder, when all the comitia of so many cities were packed together into one house, and when all the ambition of an entire province was confined in one chamber. Bribes being openly asked for, and biddings being openly made, Timarchides appointed two censors for every city. He, by his own labour, and by his own visits to every one, by all the trouble which he took in this employment, achieved this, that all the money came to Verres without his having any anxiety on his part. How much money this Timarchides made, you cannot as yet know; for a certainty; but in what a variety of manners, and how shamefully, he plundered people, you heard at the former pleading, by the evidence of many witnesses.

But that you may not wonder how that freedman obtained so much influence with him, I will tell you briefly what the man is; so that you may both see the worthlessness of the man who kept such a fellow about him, especially in that employment and position, and that you may also see the misery of the province. In the seduction of women, and in all licentiousness and wickedness of that character, I found this Timarchides wonderfully fitted by nature to be subservient to his infamous lusts, and unexampled profligacy. In finding out who people were, in calling on them, in addressing them, in bribing them, in doing anything in matters of that sort, however cunningly, however audaciously, however shamelessly it might be necessary to go to work, I heard that this man could contrive admirable schemes for ensuring success. For, as for Verres himself, he was only a man of a covetousness ever open-mouthed, and ever threatening, but he had no ingenuity, no resources; so that, in whatever he did of his own accord, (just as you know was the case with him at Rome,) he seemed to rob openly rather than to cheat.