equally guilty; the most respected Optimates,
such as Quintus Catulus, granted in an open sitting of the senate
that the complaints were quite well founded; individual specially
striking cases compelled the senate on several occasions, e. g. in 680,
to deliberate on measures to check the venality of juries,
but only of course till the first outcry had subsided and the matter
could be allowed to slip out of sight. The consequences
of this wretched administration of justice appeared especially
in a system of plundering and torturing the provincials, compared
with which even previous outrages seemed tolerable and moderate.
Stealing and robbing had been in some measure legitimized by custom;
the commission on extortions might be regarded as an institution
for taxing the senators returning from the provinces for the benefit
of their colleagues that remained at home. But when an esteemed
Siceliot, because he had not been ready to help the governor
in a crime, was by the latter condemned to death in his absence
and unheard; when even Roman burgesses, if they were not equites
or senators, were in the provinces no longer safe from the rods
and axes of the Roman magistrate, and the oldest acquisition
of the Roman democracy--security of life and person--began to be
trodden under foot by the ruling oligarchy; then even the public
in the Forum at Rome had an ear for the complaints regarding
its magistrates in the provinces, and regarding the unjust judges
who morally shared the responsibility of such misdeeds. The opposition
of course did not omit to assail its opponents in--what was almost
the only ground left to it--the tribunals. The young Gaius Caesar,
who also, so far as his age allowed, took zealous part
in the agitation for the re-establishment of the tribunician power,
brought to trial in 677 one of the most respected partisans
of Sulla the consular Gnaeus Dolabella, and in the following year
another Sullan officer Gaius Antonius; and Marcus Cicero in 684
called to account Gaius Verres, one of the most wretched
of the creatures of Sulla, and one of the worst scourges
of the provincials. Again and again were the pictures
of that dark period of the proscriptions, the fearful sufferings
of the provincials, the disgraceful state of Roman criminal justice,
unfolded before the assembled multitude with all the pomp
of Italian rhetoric, and with all the bitterness of Italian sarcasm,
and the mighty dead as well as his living