Cicero | Page 7

on
a large scale for an old-fashioned county election, by no means
omitting the intense popular excitement and mob violence appropriate

to such occasions. Temples of the gods and other public buildings
overlooked the area, and the steps of these, on any occasion of great
excitement, would be crowded by those who were anxious to see at
least, if they could not hear.
Verres, as a state criminal, would be tried before a special commission,
and by a jury composed at this time entirely from the senatorial order,
chosen by lot (with a limited right of challenge reserved to both parties)
from a panel made out every year by the praetor. This magistrate, who
was a kind of minister of justice, usually presided on such occasions,
occupying the curule chair, which was one of the well-known
privileges of high office at Rome. But his office was rather that of the
modern chairman who keeps order at a public meeting than that of a
judge. Judge, in our sense of the word, there was none; the jury were
the judges both of law and fact. They were, in short, the recognised
assessors of the praetor, in whose hands the administration of justice
was supposed to lie. The law, too, was of a highly flexible character,
and the appeals of the advocates were rather to the passions and
feelings of the jurors than to the legal points of the case. Cicero himself
attached comparatively little weight to this branch of his
profession;--"Busy as I am", he says in one of his speeches, "I could
make myself lawyer enough in three days". The jurors gave each their
vote by ballot,--'guilty', 'not guilty', or (as in the Scotch courts) 'not
proven',--and the majority carried the verdict.
But such trials as that of Verres were much more like an impeachment
before the House of Commons than a calm judicial inquiry. The men
who would have to try a defendant of his class would be, in very few
cases, honest and impartial weighers of the evidence. Their large
number (varying from fifty to seventy) weakened the sense of
individual responsibility, and laid them more open to the appeal of the
advocates to their political passions. Most of them would come into
court prejudiced in some degree by the interests of party; many would
be hot partisans. Cicero, in his treatise on 'Oratory', explains clearly for
the pleader's guidance the nature of the tribunals to which he had to
appeal. "Men are influenced in their verdicts much more by prejudice
or favour, or greed of gain, or anger, or indignation, or pleasure, or

hope or fear, or by misapprehension, or by some excitement of their
feelings, than either by the facts of the case, or by established
precedents, or by any rules or principles whatever either of law or
equity".
Verres was supported by some of the most powerful families at Rome.
Peculation on the part of governors of provinces had become almost a
recognised principle: many of those who held offices of state either had
done, or were waiting their turn to do, much the same as the present
defendant; and every effort had been made by his friends either to put
off the trial indefinitely, or to turn it into a sham by procuring the
appointment of a private friend and creature of his own as public
prosecutor. On the other hand, the Sicilian families, whom he had
wronged and outraged, had their share of influence also at Rome, and
there was a growing impatience of the insolence and rapacity of the old
governing houses, of whose worst qualities the ex-governor of Sicily
was a fair type. There were many reasons which would lead Cicero to
take up such a cause energetically. It was a great opening for him in
what we may call his profession: his former connection with the
government of Sicily gave him a personal interest in the cause of the
province; and, above all, the prosecution of a state offender of such
importance was a lift at once into the foremost ranks of political life.
He spared no pains to get up his case thoroughly. He went all over the
island collecting evidence; and his old popularity there did him good
service in the work.
There was, indeed, evidence enough against the late governor. The
reckless gratification of his avarice and his passions had seldom
satisfied him, without the addition of some bitter insult to the sufferers.
But there was even a more atrocious feature in the case, of which
Cicero did not fail to make good use in his appeal to a Roman jury.
Many of the unhappy victims had the Roman franchise. The torture of
an unfortunate Sicilian might be turned into a jest by a clever advocate
for the defence,