Verres! The name was synonymous with corruption, extortion, limitless greed, and the very worst sort of misgovernment. As my two visitors conducted Davus and me through the streets of Massilia, I wondered what possible link could connect these last pitiful sheep from Catalina’s flock to the most notorious of all Roman exiles.
It was Cicero who had prosecuted Gaius Verres a little over twenty years ago. The case had been a major scandal and established Cicero as the preeminent advocate in Rome, even as it destroyed Verres, who fled for Massilia before the court could deliver its damning verdict. The charge against Verres was extortion and criminal oppression of the people of Sicily during his three years as provincial governor of the island. Roman governors have always been notorious for exploiting their provinces and lining their own purses at the expense of the governed, while the Senate, whose members all hope for the opportunity to do the same themselves someday, turns a blind eye. It was indicative of the egregiousness of Verres's conduct that he was actually brought to trial for his offenses.
According to Cicero, who had also served as an administrator in Sicily, Verres had not only extorted the populace and plundered their civic treasuries, but had virtually stripped the island bare of every beautiful man-made object. Verres's appetite for fine works of art amounted to a mania. He especially loved paintings of the sort done in encaustic wax on wood, not least because they could easily be carried off, and he assiduously built himself a collection of the best pictures to be gleaned from every public space and private gallery in Sicily. But his greatest passion was for statues. Before Verres, every town square in Sicily, even the humblest, was decorated with the statue of a local hero or some particularly venerated deity; after Verres, the pedestals stood empty-except in those instances where the scoundrel, to squeeze even more money from the locals, had forced them to erect statues of himself, charging them outrageous sums for the privilege. Anyone who dared to oppose him, whether Sicilian or Roman, was ruthlessly disposed of. His behavior while he controlled the island was more that of a pirate than a provincial governor.
As soon as Verres's tenure was up and he returned to Rome, the Sicilians sought restitution from the Roman Senate and looked for a way to prosecute the man who had robbed them. Cicero took up their cause and, despite all Verres's legal finagling and the Senate's reluctance to prosecute one of its own, Cicero and the Sicilians eventually prevailed. The evidence assembled against Verres was so damning that even the Senate had to act; and as the trial progressed, Verres chose to flee Rome rather than face the verdict. The connoisseur of fine art set another fashion in his choice of destination; Verres fled for Massilia, and in the twenty years of political chaos that ensued, wave upon wave of Roman political exiles would follow him.
I knew who Gaius Verres was, of course-what Roman didn't?-but I had I never laid eyes on him. I knew that he was here in Massilia, but I had never expected our paths to cross. But then, nothing predictable or expected had occurred since the moment we emerged from the flooded tunnel into the city. More and more it seemed to me that Massilia was an unfamiliar world with its own peculiar rules of logic to which I must bend, willingly or not.
Verres's house was not far from the scapegoat's, somewhere along the way to Milo's house. Within her encircling walls, Massilia was a small city, and her fashionable district was very compact.
The house itself surprised me by its opulence. One thinks of exiles living in ruin and misery, or at least in reduced circumstances. But the house of Verres was even more ostentatious than that of the scapegoat, with a brightly colored facade in shades of pink and yellow, and elaborate columns flanking the entrance. A slave admitted us at once; the Catilinarians were obviously familiar visitors. The foyer was floored with yellow marble with swirling red veins, and, like a Roman house, had niches on either side housing the busts of Verres's ancestors. Or so I thought upon first glance. When my eyes adjusted to the dimness, I saw that the busts were not of ancestors after all, unless Verres claimed descent from the likes of Pericles, Aeschylus, and Homer. He had used the niches reserved for sacred display to show off specimens from his sculpture collection!
A slave led us deeper into the house. Statues and paintings were everywhere. Many of the paintings were installed on the walls, jammed close together, but others were stacked in narrow spaces between pedestals and walls, and some were even piled atop each other in corners. But the paintings, as vivid as many of them were-portraits, pastoral scenes, episodes from The Iliad and The Odyssey, erotic tableaux-faded into the background. It was the statues that dominated the house, and not just in the niches and the usual spots in front of columns or under archways. There were scores of statues, perhaps hundreds, so crowded together in some rooms that only a narrow pathway had been left clear. Their arrangement made no sense; Diana with her bow and arrow thrust her elbow into the nose of some obscure Sicilian statesman and appeared to take aim directly at the head of a seated Jupiter only a few feet way, whose stern gaze was directed at a pair of rearing life-size stags done in marble and flawlessly painted, even to the white spots on their flanks. The house was large and the rooms spacious, but it was not a palace, and a palace would have been required to properly contain so much art. As it was, I had the peculiar feeling of having stumbled into a very crowded but ominously silent house party, where the strange mix of guests were all made of bronze and marble-gods and animals, dying Gauls and cavorting satyrs, nude athletes and long-dead playwrights.
It was a kind of blasphemy to treat works of art, especially images of the gods, in such a fashion, with no respect for their unique power and singularity. I shuddered.
"Why in Hades have you brought me here?" I asked Publicius. "You'll see," he said in hushed voice. "You'll see!"
We were led at last to the garden at the house's center, where an immensely fat man in a red tunic rose from a bench to greet us. A fringe of white hair circled his perfectly round head. A strand of tiny pearls and lapis beads peeked out from between the folds of fat that circled his neck. Rings of silver and gold glittered on his fingers. Among them I saw what looked like an iron citizen's ring. Verres had no right to wear it. The court's verdict had stripped him of his citizenship.
"Publicius! Minucius! How good to see you again. Welcome to my house."
"I swear to Artemis, he gets bigger each time we see him," said Publicius under his breath in a tone more full of wonder than disdain, and then, louder, "Gaius Verres! How kind of you to welcome us. We bring two guests, newly arrived from Rome."
"Ah! Rome…" Verres's beady eyes glimmered. "So near, yet still so far away. Some day…"
"Yes, some day," Publicius agreed wistfully. "And perhaps not so long from now, from the look of things. The world has turned upside-down."
"And shaken out these two," said Verres, regarding Davus and myself.
"Ah, yes, let me introduce you. Gaius Verres, this is Gordianus, called the Finder. The father of Meto," he added in a hushed voice.
If Publicius expected our host to be impressed, the fat man disappointed him. Verres looked me up and down as if appraising an object newly offered for acquisition. His rudeness was almost refreshing after the obsequious fawning of the Catilinarians. "When I was last in Rome, you were known as Cicero's hunting dog," he said gruffly. He spat the name Cicero as if it were an epithet.