Then began a long procession of witnesses, and a fierce and venomous lot they were, with terrible tales for the ears of the judges and the public! In order to secure Verres’s conviction and sentence to a fine of one hundred million _sestertii_, under the _lex de pecuniis repetundis_, Cicero produced witnesses who accused him of every sort of crime; of having committed acts of sacrilege, of having gone shares with the pirates whom he ought to have harried and destroyed, of having been guilty of numberless acts of peculation and malversation, and of having condemned Roman citizens to death! To prove these charges, Cicero had unearthed hundreds of witnesses from every class of society, of both sexes, and of all ages, who, carefully coached and prepared beforehand, entered the witness-box to add their quota to the fierce attacks on Verres. It is difficult to judge how much of these impassioned and violent stories was true, and how much pure invention, as we have no documentary evidence relating to this trial other than the speeches for the prosecution. Besides, Verres, as we have said, did not avail himself of the right of cross-examination which the law allowed him. He allowed the avalanche of charges to slide unchecked down the slope, and to hurl itself into the valley, hoping that it would stop of its own accord. However, it is not improbable that the evidence contained no small number of exaggerations. A Sicilian friend of mine, an eminent politician and a man with a profound knowledge of his native island, is constantly reminding me that, even at the present day, the Sicilians throw so much passion into their political struggles that great circumspection is required in sifting the accusations hurled by one side against the other, when rivalry and party animosity come into play. “Only imagine,” he says, “how it must have been in ancient times.” Besides, everyone who reads Cicero’s speeches cannot help feeling, from time to time, that the list of villainies he enumerates is really too long even for the greatest villain that ever lived.