much money, as other governors had done. But he resolved that it would
pay him better to rob everywhere openly, and then, when the day of
reckoning came, to buy the judges wholesale. As to shame at such
doings, there was no such feelings left among Romans.

Before he comes to the story of Sthenius, Cicero makes a grandly
ironical appeal to the bench before him: "Yes, O judges, keep this
man; keep him in the State! Spare him, preserve him so that he,
too, may sit with us as a judge here so that he, too, may, with
impartiality, advise us, as a Senator, what may be best for us as to
peace and war! Not that we need trouble ourselves as to his senatorial
duties. His authority would be nothing. When would he dare, or when
would he care, to come among us? Unless it might be in the idle month
of February, when would a man so idle, so debauched, show himself in
the Senate-house? Let him come and show himself. Let him advise us
to attack the Cretans; to pronounce the Greeks of Byzantium free; to
declare Ptolemy King.[120] Let him speak and vote as Hortensius
may direct. This will have but little effect upon our lives or
our property. But beyond this there is something we must look to;
something that would be distrusted; something that every good man has
to fear! If by chance this man should escape out of our hands, he
would have to sit there upon that bench and be a judge. He would be
called upon to pronounce on the lives of a Roman citizen. He would be
the right-hand officer in the army of this man here,[121] of this man
who is striving to be the lord and ruler of our judgment-seats. The
people of Rome at least refuse this! This at least cannot be endured!"

The third of these narratives tells us how Verres managed in his
province that provision of corn for the use of Rome, the collection
of which made the possession of Sicily so important to the Romans. He