Verres had still one hope left; and this, strangely enough, sprang out of the very number and enormity of his crimes.  The mass of evidence was so great that the trial might be expected to last for a long time.  If it could only be protracted into the next year, when his friends would be in office, he might still hope to escape.  And indeed there was but little time left.  The trial began on the fifth of August.  In the middle of the month Pompey was to exhibit some games.  Then would come the games called “The Games of Rome,” and after this others again, filling up much of the three months of September, October, and November.  Cicero anticipated this difficulty.  He made a short speech (it could not have lasted more than two hours in delivering), in which he stated the case in outline.  He made a strong appeal to the jury.  They were themselves on their trial.  The eyes of all the world were on them.  If they did not do justice on so notorious a criminal they would never be trusted any more.  It would be seen that the senators were not fit to administer the law.  The law itself was on its trial.  The provincials openly declared that if Verres was acquitted, the law under which their governors were liable to be accused had better be repealed.  If no fear of a prosecution were hanging over them, they would be content with as much plunder as would satisfy their own wants.  They would not need to extort as much more wherewith to bribe their judges.  Then he called his witnesses.  A marvelous array they were.  “From the foot of Mount Taurus, from the shores of the Black Sea, from many cities of the Grecian mainland, from many islands of the Aegean, from every city and market-town of Sicily, deputations thronged to Rome.  In the porticoes, and on the steps of the temples, in the area of the Forum, in the colonnade that surrounded it, on the housetops and on the overlooking declivities, were stationed dense and eager crowds of impoverished heirs and their guardians, bankrupt tax-farmers and corn merchants, fathers bewailing their children carried off to the praetor’s harem, children mourning for their parents dead in the praetor’s dungeons, Greek nobles whose descent was traced to Cecrops or Eurysthenes, or to the great Ionian and Minyan houses, and Phoenicians, whose ancestors had been priests of the Tyrian Melcarth, or claimed kindred with the Zidonian Jah."[3] Nine days were spent in hearing this mass of evidence.  Hortensius was utterly overpowered by it.  He had no opportunity for displaying his eloquence, or making a pathetic appeal for a noble oppressed by the hatred of the democracy.  After a few feeble attempts at cross-examination, he practically abandoned the case.  The defendant himself perceived that his position was hopeless.  Before the nine days, with their terrible impeachment, had come to an end he fled from Rome.

[Footnote 3:  Article in “Dictionary of Classical Biography and Mythology,” by William Bodham Donne.]