house comfortable. He gives a great supper, at which the Romans eat
and drink, and purposely create a tumult. Verres, we understand, was
not there. The intention is that the girl shall be carried away and
brought to him. In the middle of their cups the father is desired to
produce his daughter; but this he refuses to do. Rubrius then orders
the doors to be closed, and proceeds to ransack the house.
Philodamus, who will not stand this, fetches his son, and calls his
fellow-citizens around him. Rubrius succeeds in pouring boiling water
over his host, but in the row the Romans get the worst of it. At last
one of Verres's lictors--absolutely a Roman lictor--is killed, and the
woman is not carried off. The man at least bore the outward signs of
a lictor, but, according to Cicero, was in the pay of Verres as his
pimp.

So far Verres fails; and the reader, rejoicing at the courage of the
father who could protect his own house even against Romans, begins to
feel some surprise that this case should have been selected. So far
the lieutenant had not done the mischief he had intended, but he
soon avenges his failure. He induces Dolabella, his chief, to have
Philodamus and his son carried off to Laodicea, and there tried before
Nero, the then Proconsul, for killing the sham lictor. They are tried
at Laodicea before Nero, Verres himself sitting as one of the judges,
and are condemned. Then in the market place of the town, in the
presence of each other, the father and son are beheaded--a thing, as
Cicero says, very sad for all Asia to behold. All this had been done
some years ago; and, nevertheless, Verres had been chosen Praetor, and
sent to Sicily to govern the Sicilians.

When Verres was Praetor at Rome--the year before he was sent to
Sicily--it became his duty, or rather privilege, as he found it, to