Imperium

We moved on a few days later, rattling down the unmade tracks from Lilybaeum to the temple city of Agrigentum, then up into the mountainous heart of the island. The winter was unusually harsh; the land and sky were iron. Cicero caught a bad cold and sat wrapped in his cloak in the back of our cart. At He

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.