When, after fourteen days of discussion, the first phase of the case came to an end and there was a suspension of proceedings pending the second phase, Verres, his defenders, and his friends, were obliged to hold a council of war. The situation was desperate. The hope of tiring out public opinion with the length of the proceedings had proved a vain illusion. There was no longer room for hope that the court might acquit Verres. Even if every one of the judges had been convinced of the entire and complete innocence of Verres, they would not have dared to acquit him in face of the excited state of public opinion, for fear of being suspected of corruption. Rome, Italy, the Empire, would have declared with one voice that the judges had absolved Verres because they had been bought with the gold which he had extorted in such quantities from the Sicilians. The public clamoured for their victim. Besides, even supposing that the judges had the inconceivable courage to acquit Verres, his political career, after such a scandal, was at an end. What use was it then to persist with the struggle, when the battle was already irretrievably lost? It was best to give in. Verres had better not show himself further at the trial, and had better go into voluntary exile. In that case, he was sure to be fined much less heavily, and to save his patrimony from the wreck of his political fortunes. Verres bowed his head to destiny, which had chosen him to be, in the eyes of Italy and the Empire, the victim sacrificed to expiate the misdeeds and the outrages committed by all the Roman governors since the restoration of Sulla. When the trial began again, for the second and decisive phase, he did not put in an appearance. He had already gone into exile. Such was the delight of the judges that, by declaring himself guilty, he had spared them the unpleasant and responsible task of doing so themselves, that they inflicted upon him the lightest of punishments. They condemned him to pay, not _one hundred_ millions, as the Sicilians demanded, but only _three_ millions of _sestertii_. A fine of three million _sestertii_ was the judicial imprimatur on a trial, in the course of which a member of the Roman aristocracy had been accused by a host of witnesses of the greatest atrocities and outrages, some of which, if true, would have sufficed to bring him to the scaffold.