It was while he held the office of Aedile that he made his first appearance as public prosecutor, and brought to justice the most important criminal of the day.  Verres, late Praetor in Sicily, was charged with high crimes and misdemeanours in his government.  The grand scale of his offences, and the absorbing interest of the trial, have led to his case being quoted as an obvious parallel to that of Warren Hastings, though with much injustice to the latter, so far as it may seem to imply any comparison of moral character.  This Verres, the corrupt son of a corrupt father, had during his three years’ rule heaped on the unhappy province every evil which tyranny and rapacity could inflict.  He had found it prosperous and contented:  he left it exhausted and smarting under its wrongs.  He met his impeachment now with considerable confidence.  The gains of his first year of office were sufficient, he said, for himself; the second had been for his friends; the third produced more than enough to bribe a jury.

The trials at Rome took place in the Forum—­the open space, of nearly five acres, lying between the Capitoline and Palatine hills.  It was the city market-place, but it was also the place where the population assembled for any public meeting, political or other—­where the idle citizen strolled to meet his friends and hear the gossip of the day, and where the man of business made his appointments.  Courts for the administration of justice—­magnificent halls, called basilicae—­had by this time been erected on the north and south sides, and in these the ordinary trials took place; but for state trials the open Forum was itself the court.  One end of the wide area was raised on a somewhat higher level—­a kind of dais on a large scale—­and was separated from the rest by the Rostra, a sort of stage from which the orators spoke.  It was here that the trials were held.  A temporary tribunal for the presiding officer, with accommodation for counsel, witnesses, and jury, was erected in the open air; and the scene may perhaps best be pictured by imagining the principal square in some large town fitted up with open hustings on a large scale for an old-fashioned county election, by no means omitting the intense popular excitement and mob violence appropriate to such occasions.  Temples of the gods and other public buildings overlooked the area, and the steps of these, on any occasion of great excitement, would be crowded by those who were anxious to see at least, if they could not hear.

Verres, as a state criminal, would be tried before a special commission, and by a jury composed at this time entirely from the senatorial order, chosen by lot (with a limited right of challenge reserved to both parties) from a panel made out every year by the praetor.  This magistrate, who was a kind of minister of justice, usually presided on such occasions, occupying the curule chair, which was one of the well-known privileges of high office at Rome.  But his office