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SPEECHES
Exordia, in Cicero's opinion, should be moderate and ingratiating in tone,
spacious and periodic in style, but pointed with apophthegms designed to commend
yourself or discredit your adversary (Orat. 125). He conformed to this
doctrine unless he had reason to do otherwise, as in the most famous case of all
when, no doubt in order to startle the Senate into a sense of crisis, he began:
Quousque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientiam nostram? 'How much longer,
Catiline, are you going to abuse our patience?' Generally the impassioned
climaxes would be more effective after a temperate opening.
A considerable portion of the speeches naturally consists in narrative. If
Cicero had written history ('a particularly oratorical genre', as he called it), his
style would no doubt have largely displayed the 'milky richness' that was
attributed to Livy. But in court the first essential was clarity: the jury must
grasp and remember the facts as represented. Hence in the story of Sopater of
Halyciae in Verrines 2.68—75, extending to about 875 words, the average length
of a sentence is only fourteen words. Narratives must also be unadorned, almost
colloquial: they must give 'a most clever imitation of simplicity', in the words
of Quintilian, who especially admired the account of Clodius' murder in the
Pro Milone, perhaps the most perfect of Cicero's speeches: *' Milo, after attending
the senate on that day until the end of the sitting, went home, changed his
shoes and his clothes, hung around a little while his wife got ready, the way
wives do, and then set out at an hour when Clodius, if he had really wanted to
get back to Rome that day, could already have been there. . .'
The Second Actio of the Verrines, in five books, was designed from the start
to be read. Cicero must have been aware that, while he must refer to all possible
crimes of Verres, there was a certain sameness about them that would pall. By
the fifth book he was therefore particularly concerned to be readable. Verres had
been Governor of Sicily from 73 to 70, his tenure prolonged because the serious
slave revolt of Spartacus broke out on the mainland in 73, and Sicily, as the
scene of previous revolts, was considered precarious. In fact it did not spread to
the island, and Cicero had to anticipate that this would be credited by his
opponents to the Governor's military efficiency. He marshalled all his powers of
telling detail and innuendo in a devastating account that presages Tacitus
(1—101). Even a summary may give some impression.
Hortensius, he says (3), would no doubt compare Verres with his predecessor Manius
Aquilius, who had put down the slave rising in Sicily in 101. 'When he was impeached
for extortion, Aquilius' counsel had dramatically secured his acquittal by tearing open
his tunic before the jury and the Roman people to show the honourable scars he bore
on the front of his body. (This is a time-fuse whose detonation comes only at 32: 'Are
you going to ask Verres to stand up, bare his breast, and show the Roman people his
scars — the records of women's lascivious love-bites?') Aquilius' measures had secured
1 Inst. 4.2.57—9; Mil. »8.
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