In C. Verrem

Be it so. You reject the corn of Halesa, you have corn from another tribe which you approve of. Buy that which pleases you; dismiss those whose corn you have rejected. But from those whom you reject you exact such sum of money as may be equivalent to the quantity of corn which you require of their city. Is there any doubt what your object has been? I see from the public documents that the people of Halesa gave you fifteen sesterces for every medimnus—I will prove from the accounts of the wealthiest of the cultivators, that at the same time no one in Sicily sold corn at a higher price. What, then, is the reason for your rejecting, or rather what madness is it to reject corn which comes from that place from which the senate and the people of Rome ordered it to be brought? which comes from that very heap, a part of which, under the name of tenths, you had actually approved of? and besides, to exact money from the cities for the purchase of cow, when you had already received it from the treasury? Did the Terentian law enjoin you to buy corn from the Sicilians with the money of the Sicilians, or to buy corn from the Sicilians with the money of the Roman people?

But now you see that all that money out of the treasury, which ought to have been given to these cities for corn, has been made profit of by that man. For you take fifteen sesterces for a medimus of wheat; for that is the value of a medimus at that time. You keep eighteen sesterces; for that is the price of Sicilian corn, estimated according to law. What difference does it make whether you did this, or whether you did not reject the corn, but, after the corn was approved and accepted, detained all the public money, and paid none to any city whatever? when the valuation of the law is such that while it is tolerable to the Sicilians at other times, it ought also to be pleasant to them during your praetorship. For a modius is valued by law at three sesterces. But, while you were praetor, it was, as you boast in many letters to your friends, valued at two sesterces. But suppose it was three sesterces, since you exacted that price from the cities for every modius. When, if you had paid the Sicilians as much as the Roman people had ordered you to pay, it might have been most pleasing to the cultivators, you not only did not choose them to receive what they ought, but you even compelled them to pay what was not due from them.

And that these things were done in this manner, you may know, O judges, both from the public documents of the cities, and from their public testimonies; in all which you will find nothing false, nothing invented as suited to the times. Everything which we speak of is entered in the returns and made up in a regular manner, without any interpolations or irregularities being foisted into the people's accounts, but while they are all made up with deliberation and accuracy. Read the accounts of the people of Halesa. To whom does he say that money was paid? Speak, speak, I say, a little louder. “To Volcatius, to Timarchides, to Maevius.” What is all this, O Verres? have you not left yourself even this argument in your defence, that they are the managers of the companies who have been concerned in those matters? that they are the managers who have rejected the corn? that they are the managers who have settled the affair with the cities for money? and that it is they also who have taken money from you in the name of those cities? and, moreover, that they have bought corn for themselves; and that all these things do not at all concern you? It would, in truth, be an insufficient and a wretched defence for a praetor to say this, “I never touched the corn, I never saw it, I gave the managers of the companies the power of approving of rejecting it; the managers extorted money from the cities but I paid to the managers the money which I ought to have paid to the people.”

This is, as I have said, an insufficient, or rather, a profligate defence against an accusation. But still, even this one, if you were to wish to use it, you cannot use. Volcatius, the delight of yourself and your friends, forbids you to make mention of the manager; and Timarchides, the prop of your household, stops the mouth of your defence; who, as well as Volcatius, had money paid to him from the cities. But now your clerk, with that golden ring of his, which he procured out of these matters, will not allow you to avail yourself of that argument. What then remains for you, except to confess that you sent to Rome corn which had been bought with the money of the Sicilians? that you appropriated the public money to your own purposes? O you habit of sinning, what delight you afford to the wicked and the audacious, when chastisement is afar off, and when impunity attends you!

This is not the first time that that man has been guilty of that sort of peculation, but now for the first time is he convicted. We have seen money paid to him from the treasury, while he was quaestor, for the expense of a consular army; we saw, a few months afterwards, both army and consul stripped of everything All that money lay hid in that obscurity and darkness which at that time had seized upon the whole republic. After that, he discharged the duties of the quaestorship to which he succeeded under Dolabella. He embezzled a vast sum of money; but he mixed up his accounts of that money with the confusion consequent on the conviction of Dolabella. Immense sums of money were entrusted to him when praetor. You will not find him a man to lick up these most infamous profits nervously and gently; he did not hesitate to swallow up at a gulp the whole of the public money. That wicked covetousness, when it is implanted in a man's nature, creeps on in such a way, when the habit of sinning has emancipated itself from restraint, that it is not able to put any limits to its audacity.

At length it is detected, and it is detected in affairs of great importance, and of undoubted certainty. And it seems to me that, by the interposition of the gods, this man too has become involved in such dishonesty, as not only to suffer punishment for the crimes which he has lately committed, but also to be overwhelmed with the vengeance due to the sins which he committed against Carbo and against Dolabella. There is in truth also another new feature in this crime, O judges, which will remove all doubts as to his criminality on the former charge respecting the tenths. For, to say nothing of this fact, that very many of the cultivators of the soil had not corn enough for the second tenths, and for those eight thousand modii which they were bound to sell to the Roman people, but that they bought them of your agent, that is, of Apronius; which is a clear proof that you had left the cultivators actually nothing: to pass over this, which teas been clearly set forth in many men's evidence, can anything be more certain than this,—that all the corn of Sicily, and all the crops of the land liable to the payment of tenths, were for three years in your power and in your barns?

for when you were demanding of the cities money for corn, whence was the corn to be procured for you to send to Rome, if you had it not all collected and locked up? Therefore, in the affair of that corn, the first profit of all was that of the corn itself, which had been taken by violence from the cultivators; the next profit was because that very corn which had been procured by you during your three years, you sold not once, but twice; not for one payment, but for two, though it was one and the same lot of corn; once to the cities, for fifteen sesterces a medimnus, a second time to the Roman people, from whom you got eighteen sesterces a medimus for the very same corn.

But perhaps you approved besides of the corn of the Centuripans, of the Agrigentines, and of some others, and paid money to these nations. There may be some cities in that number whose corn you were unwilling to object to. What then? Was all the money that was owed for corn paid to these cities? Find me one—not one people, but one cultivator. See, seek, look around, if perchance there is any single man in that province in which you were governor for three years, who does not wish you to be ruined. Produce me one, I say, out of all those cultivators who contributed money even to raise a statue to you, who will say that everything that was due for corn was paid. I pledge myself, O judges, that none will say so.

Out of all the money which it was your duty to pay to the cultivators, you were in the habit of making deductions on certain pretexts; first of all for the examination, and for the difference in the exchanges; secondly, for some stealing money or other. All these names, O judges, do not belong to any legal demand, but to the most infamous robberies. For what difference of exchange can there be when all use one kind of money? And what is sealing money How has this name got introduced into the accounts of a magistrate? how came it to be connected with the public money? For the third description of deduction was such as if it were not only lawful, but even proper; and not only proper, but absolutely necessary. Two fiftieths were deducted from the entire sum in the name of the clerk. Who gave you leave to do this?—what law? what authority of the senate? Moreover where was the justice of your clerk taking such a sum, whether it was taken from the property of the cultivators, or from the revenues of the Roman people?