Book 4
86
And all these things (for I do not think that I ought to omit any particular of his impudence) were done openly in the middle of the assembly, while Verres was sitting on his chair of office, in a lofty situation. It was the depth of winter; the weather, as you heard Sopater himself state, was bitterly cold; heavy rain was falling; when that fellow orders the lictors to throw Sopater headlong down from the portico on which he himself was sitting, and to strip him naked. The command was scarcely, out of his mouth, before you might have seen him stripped and surrounded by the lictors. All thought that the unhappy and innocent man was going to be scourged. They were mistaken. Do you think that Verres would scourge without any reason an ally and friend of the Roman people? He is not so wicked. All vices are not to be found in that man; he was never cruel. He treated the man with great gentleness and clemency. In the middle of the forum there are some statues of the Marcelli, as there are in most of the other towns of Sicily; out of these he selected the statue of Caius Marcellus, whose services to that city and to the whole province were most recent and most important. On that statue he orders Sopater, a man of noble birth in his city, and at that very time invested with the chief magistracy, to be placed astride and bound to it.
