When we read the violent speeches which Cicero wrote after the trial, and which he would have pronounced, if it had continued into its second phase, in order to sum up and point the moral of the terrible evidence which had been given against Verres; when we compare these speeches and the charges which they formulate, annotate, and tabulate with the lenient and light penalty inflicted, we can, at first blush, only feel surprise. The historian asks himself whether the whole of this trial—which is certainly one of the most famous in the history of the world—was not a sort of comedy played by actors of great skill for the benefit of an ignorant and ingenuous public. Such a judgment would, however, be too severe. Cicero was an honourable and upright man, and defended the cause of his Sicilian clients with sincerity and loyalty. No, this trial was not simply a judicial episode. It was a political drama, and, like all political dramas, was overlaid with phenomena which to a certain extent hide its real nature and essence from the eyes of posterity as it hid these from those of its contemporaries. It must not be forgotten that all the actors in this trial, the accused, the prosecutor, the defending counsel, and the judges, belonged to the same aristocracy. At a certain moment this aristocracy had found itself compelled, by intestinal quarrels and by a complex political situation, to sacrifice, in a trial at law, one of its members in order to satisfy public opinion, Italy, and the Empire; in order to prove that it was not true, as a whole party was busy whispering about Rome, that the Roman governors, provided they belonged to the Conservative aristocracy, were allowed to do what they liked in the provinces and that their subjects were abandoned defenceless to their caprices and their greed. But the particular member of the aristocracy whom it was found necessary to sacrifice, whether he were or were not so great a villain as his enemies asserted, had friends, protectors, and supporters who exerted an influence sufficiently great amongst the dominant party to admit of too ruthless an attack being made upon him.