a multitude of men that the whole neighborhood echoes again with the daily music of singers, and harp-players, and flute-players, and with the uproar of his nightly banquets.  What daily expenses, what extravagance, as you well know, gentlemen, there must be in such a life as this! how costly must be these banquets!  Creditable banquets, indeed, held in such a house—­a house, do I say, and not a manufactory of wickedness, a place of entertainment for every kind of crime?  And as for the man himself—­you see, gentlemen, how he bustles every where about the forum, with his hair fashionably arranged and dripping with perfumes; what a crowd of citizens, yes, of citizens, follow him; you see how he looks down upon every one, thinks no one can be compared to himself, fancies himself the one rich and powerful man in Rome?”

The jury seems to have caught the contagion of courage from the advocate.  They acquitted the accused.  It is not known whether he ever recovered his property.  But as Sulla retired from power in the following year, and died the year after, we may hope that the favorites and the villains whom he had sheltered were compelled to disgorge some at least of their gains.

CHAPTER IV.

A ROMAN MAGISTRATE.

Of all the base creatures who found a profit in the massacres and plunderings which Sulla commanded or permitted, not one was baser than Caius Verres.  The crimes that he committed would be beyond our belief if it were not for the fact that he never denied them.  He betrayed his friends, he perverted justice, he plundered a temple with as little scruple as he plundered a private house, he murdered a citizen as boldly as he murdered a foreigner; in fact, he was the most audacious, the most cruel, the most shameless of men.  And yet he rose to high office at home and abroad, and had it not been for the courage, sagacity, and eloquence of one man, he might have risen to the very highest.  What Roman citizens had sometimes, and Roman subjects, it is to be feared, very often to endure may be seen from the picture which we are enabled to draw of a Roman magistrate.

Roman politicians began public life as quaestors. (A quaestor was an official who managed money matters for higher magistrates.  Every governor of a province had one or more quaestors under him.  They were elected at Rome, and their posts were assigned to them by lot.) Verres was quaestor in Gaul and embezzled the public money; he was quaestor in Cilicia with Dolabella, a like-minded governor, and diligently used his opportunity.  This time it was not money only, but works of art, on which he laid his hands; and in these the great cities, whether in Asia or in Europe, were still rich.  The most audacious, perhaps, of these robberies was perpetrated in the island of Delos.  Delos was known all over the world as the island of Apollo.  The legend was that it was the birthplace of the god.  None of his shrines