Such a governor was not likely to keep his province free from the pirates who, issuing from their fastnesses on the Cilician coast and elsewhere, kept the seaboard cities of the Mediterranean in constant terror.  One success, and one only, he seems to have gained over them.  His fleet was lucky enough to come upon a pirate ship, which was so overladen with spoil that it could neither escape nor defend itself.  News was at once carried to Verres, who roused himself from his feasting to issue strict orders that no one was to meddle with the prize.  It was towed into Syracuse, and he hastened to examine his booty.  The general feeling was one of delight that a crew of merciless villains had been captured and were about to pay the penalty of their crimes.  Verres had far more practical views.  Justice might deal as she pleased with the old and useless; the young and able bodied, and all who happened to be handicraftsmen, were too valuable to be given up.  His secretaries, his retinue, his son had their share of the prize; six, who happened to be singers, were sent as a present to a friend at Rome.  As to the pirate captain himself, no one knew what had become of him.  It was a favorite amusement in Sicily to watch the sufferings of a pirate, if the government had had the luck but to catch one, while he was being slowly tortured to death.  The people of Syracuse, to whom the pirate captain was only too well known, watched eagerly for the day when he was to be brought out to suffer.  They kept an account of those who were brought out to execution, and reckoned them against the number of the crew, which it had been easy to conjecture from the size of the ship.  Verres had to correct the deficiency as best he could.  He had the audacity to fill the places of the prisoners whom he had sold or given away with Roman citizens, whom on various false pretenses he had thrown into prison.  The pirate captain himself was suffered to escape on the payment, it was believed, of a very large sum of money.

But Verres had not yet done with the pirates.  It was necessary that some show, at least, of coping with them should be made.  There was a fleet, and the fleet must put to sea.  A citizen of Syracuse, who had no sort of qualification for the task, but whom Verres was anxious to get out of the way, was appointed to the command.  The governor paid it the unwonted attention of coming out of his tent to see it pass.  His very dress, as he stood upon the shore, was a scandal to all beholders.  His sandals, his purple cloak, his tunic, or under-garment, reaching to his ankles, were thought wholly unsuitable to the dignity of a Roman magistrate.  The fleet, as might be expected, was scandalously ill equipped.  Its men for the most part existed, as the phrase is, only “on paper.”  There was the proper complement of names, but of names only.  The praetor drew from the treasury the pay for these imaginary soldiers and marines, and diverted it into his own pocket.  And the ships were as ill provisioned