name—­will be always remembered as having supplied Lord Palmerston with one of his most telling illustrations.  But this great speech of Cicero’s—­perhaps the most magnificent piece of declamation in any language—­though written and preserved to us was never spoken.  The whole of the pleadings in the case, which extend to some length, were composed for the occasion, no doubt, in substance, and we have to thank Cicero for publishing them afterwards in full.  But Verres only waited to hear the brief opening speech of his prosecutor; he did not dare to challenge a verdict, but allowing judgment to go by default, withdrew to Marseilles soon after the trial opened.  He lived there, undisturbed in the enjoyment of his plunder, long enough to see the fall and assassination of his great accuser, but only (as it is said) to share his fate soon afterwards as one of the victims of Antony’s proscription.  Of his guilt there can be no question; his fear to face a court in which he had many friends is sufficient presumptive evidence of it; but we must hesitate in assuming the deepness of its dye from the terrible invectives of Cicero.  No sensible person will form an opinion upon the real merits of a case, even in an English court of justice now, entirely from the speech of the counsel for the prosecution.  And if we were to go back a century or two, to the state trials of those days, we know that to form our estimate of a prisoner’s guilt from such data only would be doing him a gross injustice.  We have only to remember the exclamation of Warren Hastings himself, whose trial, as has been said, has so many points of resemblance with that of Verres, when Burke sat down after the torrent of eloquence which he had hurled against the accused in his opening speech for the prosecution;—­“I thought myself for the moment”, said Hastings, “the guiltiest man in England”.

The result of this trial was to raise Cicero at once to the leadership—­if so modern an expression may be used—­of the Roman bar.  Up to this time the position had been held by Hortensius, the counsel for Verres, whom Cicero himself calls “the king of the courts”.  He was eight years the senior of Cicero in age, and many more professionally, for he is said to have made his first public speech at nineteen.  He had the advantage of the most extraordinary memory, a musical voice, and a rich flow of language:  but Cicero more than implies that he was not above bribing a jury.  It was not more disgraceful in those days than bribing a voter in our own.  The two men were very unlike in one respect; Hortensius was a fop and an exquisite (he is said to have brought an action against a colleague for disarranging the folds of his gown), while Cicero’s vanity was quite of another kind.  After Verres’s trial, the two advocates were frequently engaged together in the same cause and on the same side:  but Hortensius seems quietly to have abdicated his forensic sovereignty before the rising fame of his younger rival.