The elections over, attention was again directed to the trial, the opening of which was fixed for the 5th of August; and the two parties began to sharpen their weapons for the decisive and supreme issue. There were two phases to a Roman trial; in the initial phase, the prosecutor had the first word, opening his case, and the defendant replied; the witnesses also were heard. Then followed a suspension of the proceedings, after which the prosecutor once more spoke and the defendant once more replied. Then the jury—for the Court was composed of a jury drawn by lot from the body of Senators and presided over by the Prætor—gave its verdict. Those in favour of acquittal wrote an A (_absolvo_) on the waxed tablet, those in favour of conviction wrote a C (_condemno_). Cicero’s intention was to abbreviate his opening statement as much as possible; then to bring forward a large number of witnesses whom he had brought from Sicily and collected in Rome, so as to make a complete history of the whole of Verres’s political life and administration. The charge against Verres was that he had extorted forty million _sestertii_ from the provincials. But it would not satisfy Cicero to prove only this point. He wanted to show that Verres had been guilty of the countless rascalities which the popular voice attributed to him, beginning from the time of his first occupation of the office of quæstor; in short, to reconstruct with the help of witnesses and documentary evidence the whole of his public and private life. To strengthen the impression made by his case, he intended to bring the witnesses forward in groups corresponding to the different charges, and to introduce one group after the other, prefacing the introduction of each group with a short explanatory speech, in such a way as to focus the attention of the public each time on a definite and precise episode in Verres’s career.