Cicero details, at enormous length, Verres’ grooming of innocent virgins, his fiddling of the taxes, his profiteering from the corn supply, and his systematic thieving of some of the famous masterpieces of Sicily, interspersed with poignant tales of the victims. He lingers, for example, on the plight of one Heius, once the proud possessor of statues by some of the most renowned classical Greek sculptors, including Praxiteles and Polyclitus, heirlooms kept in a ‘shrine’ in his house. Other Romans had admired these, even borrowed them. Verres turned up and forced him to sell them for a
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