17.
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Oh, but Caius Verres has done you such an injury as might afflict the minds of all the
rest of the Sicilians also, though the grievance was felt only by another. Nothing of
the sort. For I think it is material also to this argument to consider what sort of
injury is alleged and brought forward as the cause of your enmity. Allow me to relate
it. For he indeed, unless he is wholly destitute of sense, will never say what it is.
There is a woman of the name of Agonis, a Lilybaean, a freedwoman of Venus Erycina; a
woman who before this man was quaestor was notoriously well off and rich. From her some
prefect of Antonius's 1 carried off
some musical slaves whom he said he wished to use in his fleet. Then she, as is the
custom in Sicily for all the slaves of
Venus, and all those who have procured their
emancipation from her, in order to hinder the designs of the prefect, by the scruples
which the name of Venus would raise, said that
she and all her property belonged to Venus.
[56]
When this
was reported to Caecilius, that most excellent and upright man, he ordered Agonis to be
summoned before him; he immediately orders a trial to ascertain “if it
appeared that she had said that she and all her property belonged to Venus.”
The recuperators 2 decide all that was necessary, and indeed there was no
doubt at all that she had said so. He sends men to take possession of the woman's
property. He adjudges her herself to be again a slave of Venus; then he sells her
property and confiscates the money. So while Agonis wishes to keep a few slaves under
the name and religious protection of Venus, she loses all her fortunes and her own
liberty by the wrong doing of that man. After that, Verres comes to Lilybaeum; he takes cognisance of the affair; he
disapproves of the act; he compels his quaestor to pay back and restore to its owner all
the money which he had confiscated, having been received for the property of Agonis.
[57]
He is here, and you may well admire it, no longer
Verres, but Quintus Mucius. 3 For
what could he do more delicate to obtain a high character among men? what more just to
relieve the distress of the women? what more severe to repress the licentiousness of his
quaestor? All this appears to me most exceedingly praiseworthy. But at the very next
step, in a moment, as if he had drank of some Circaean cup, having been a man, he
becomes Verres again; he returns to himself and to his old habits. For of that money he
appropriated a great share to himself, and restored to the woman only as much as he
chose.
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1 Antonius had been appointed as naval commander-in-chief along the whole coast; in which capacity it was that he made his unauthorized attack on Crete, which gave rise to the war in which the island was reduced by Metellus Creticus.
2 “In many cases a single judex was appointed, in others several were appointed, and they seem sometimes to have been called recuperatores, as opposed to the single judex.”—Smith, Dict. Ant. p. 529, v. Judex.
3 “Quintus Mucius Scaevola is spoken of here, who in be year A.U.C. 660 was sent as proconsul to Asia, where he governed with such justice and strictness that the senate afterwards by formal decree reminded magistrates about to depart for that province of his example.”—Hottoman.
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