Cicero himself who apparently attacks Verres with such fury, in reality endeavours to do him as little harm as possible. At every stage of his comments on the serious evidence of the witnesses, he says that, if Verres is not convicted under the _lex de pecuniis repetundis_, he will accuse him of a greater crime, as though to persuade him that the prosecution has had the utmost possible regard for him. In short, the trial and the condemnation of Verres were a twofold satisfaction which the Roman aristocracy was forced to offer to the public opinion of Italy and to the provinces; but, while offering it, she tried, in every possible way, to temper the blow to the predestined victim. In fact, Verres, though forced to renounce every political ambition, was able to live the life of a _grand seigneur_ quietly in Italy. And that is actually what he did, devoting himself especially to the collection of those works of art for which he had such a passion. After the trial, there is no mention of him in Roman history. He disappears; and, after the year 70, his name does not reappear till more than twenty-seven years later as one of the victims of the famous proscriptions organised in 43 and 42 by Antonius, Lepidus, and Octavianus: the same proscriptions in which Cicero, his accuser, perished. Inasmuch as Verres had been for the elapsed twenty-seven years but an obscure spectator of the political struggles of Rome, it is clear that he must have been included in the lists of the proscribed because his riches excited the cupidity of the Triumvirs. The famous trial, while it cut short Verres’s political career, brought Cicero’s to the heights of success. The trial of Verres made of Cicero, who up to that time had been a promising young man, one of the foremost political figures in Rome. The Conservative aristocracy recognised in him an orator whose eloquence might be terrible. The Democratic party was grateful to him for the humiliation which he had inflicted on the dominant party. Italy and the provinces welcomed in him the honourable Senator, the disinterested advocate, the intrepid defender of down-trodden justice, the man who had publicly affirmed, at no small risk to himself, that Rome owed it to her own honour to govern with equity and uprightness the immense empire of which fortune had made her mistress. Assuredly, Cicero deserved such admiration, even though his attack on Verres had not been so bitter as the public supposed.