The case over, and keen not to waste his hard work, Cicero circulated in written form what he had said at the opening of the trial, along with the remaining speeches that he would have given against Verres had it continued. The full text of these still survives, copied and recopied throughout the ancient world and the Middle Ages as a model of how to denounce an enemy. Several hundred pages in all, it is a litany of lurid examples of Verres’ cruel exploitation of the inhabitants of Sicily, with flashbacks to earlier villainies before he reached the island in 73 BCE.
