The Sicilians had remembered this promise. The laws of ancient Rome allowed any citizen to cite in the courts any other citizen whom he suspected of having broken the laws. Would Cicero cite Verres in Sicily’s behalf? The proposal of the Sicilian cities was a proof of remarkable confidence, but it was at the same time a dangerous honour. Verres was a rich man; he was powerful and had any number of helpers and supporters among the party in power. Of even greater assistance to Verres than the friendship of the influential was the feeling of community of interest amongst the dominant faction. This faction was the faction of Sulla, that is to say, the more conservative portion of the nobility, which, after a terrible civil war waged against the Democratic party, had succeeded in seizing the reins of government of the Republic. It was a faction composed of widely differing ingredients. It comprised not a few honourable and upright men, who would naturally wish the provinces to be governed humanely and uprightly. But great though the desire might be that the Empire should be governed well, still greater was the desire to preserve, together with the constitution imposed by Sulla on the Empire, the power bequeathed by him. At this juncture, the opposite party had been conquered but not destroyed, and its survivors were restlessly alert for every opportunity of injuring the dominant faction with all the arms provided by the constitution, amongst which one of the most dangerous was precisely the initiation of scandalous charges against prominent persons. Consequently, legal proceedings and scandals intended to discredit the State had, since Sulla’s time, been looked on with much disfavour by the dominant party, even honourable members of which, faced with the choice between the harm which one of these processes caused to the party and to the authority of the State and the injury to justice resulting from the escape of a powerful culprit unpunished, nearly always preferred the second.