At first sight, it was nothing much-merely some correspondence from a tax inspector, Lucius Canuleius, who was responsible for collecting export duty on all goods passing through Syracuse harbor. The letters concerned one particular shipment of goods which had left Syracuse two years before, and upon which Verres had failed to pay any tax. The details were attached: four hundred casks of honey, fifty dining room couches, two hundred chandeliers, and ninety bales of Maltese cloth. Another prosecutor might not have spotted the significance, but Cicero saw it at once.

“Take a look at that,” he said, handing it to me. “These are not goods seized from a number of unfortunate individuals. Four hundred casks of honey? Ninety bales of foreign cloth?” He turned his furious gaze on the hapless Vibius. “This is a cargo, isn’t it? Your Governor Verres must have stolen a ship .”

Poor Vibius never stood a chance. Glancing nervously over his shoulder at his bewildered guests, who were staring open-mouthed in our direction, he confirmed that this was indeed a ship’s cargo, and that Canuleius had been instructed never again to attempt to levy tax on any of the governor’s exports.

“How many more such shipments did Verres make?” demanded Cicero.

“I am not sure.”

“Guess then.”

“Ten,” said Vibius fearfully. “Perhaps twenty.”

“And no duty was ever paid? No records kept?”

“No.”

“And where did Verres acquire all these cargoes?” demanded Cicero.

Vibius was almost swooning with terror. “Senator. Please-”

“I shall have you arrested,” said Cicero. “I shall have you transported to Rome in chains. I shall break you on the witness stand before a thousand spectators in the Forum Romanum and feed what’s left of you to the dogs of the Capitoline Triad.”

“From ships, senator,” said Vibius, in a little mouse voice. “They came from ships.”

“What ships? Ships from where?”

“From everywhere, senator. Asia. Syria. Tyre. Alexandria.”

“So what happened to these ships? Did Verres have them impounded?”

“Yes, senator.”

“On what grounds?”

“Spying.”

“Ah, spying! Of course! Did ever a man,” said Cicero to me, “root out so many spies as our vigilant Governor Verres? So tell us,” he said, turning back to Vibius, “what became of the crews of these spy ships?”

“They were taken to the Stone Quarries, senator.”

“And what happened to them then?”

He made no reply.

THE STONE QUARRIES was the most fearsome prison in Sicily, probably the most fearsome in the world-at any rate, I never heard of worse. It was six hundred feet long and two hundred wide, gouged deep into the solid rock of that fortified plateau known as Epipolae, which overlooks Syracuse from the north. Here, in this hellish pit, from which no scream could carry, exposed without protection to the burning heat of summer and the cold downpours of winter, tormented by the cruelty of their guards and the debased appetites of their fellow prisoners alike, the victims of Verres suffered and died.

Cicero, with his notorious aversion to military life, was often charged with cowardice by his enemies, and certainly he was prone to nerves and squeamishness. But I can vouch that he was brave enough that day. He went back to our headquarters and collected Lucius, leaving young Frugi behind to continue his search of the tax records. Then, armed only with our walking sticks and the warrant issued by Glabrio, and followed by the now usual crowd of Syracusans, we climbed the steep path to Epipolae, where the news of Cicero’s approach and the nature of his mission had preceded him. After the senator issued a withering harangue to the captain of the guard, threatening all manner of dire repercussions if his demands were not met, we were allowed to pass through the perimeter wall and onto the plateau. Once inside, refusing to heed warnings that it was too dangerous, Cicero insisted on being allowed to inspect the quarries himself.

This vast dungeon, the work of Dionysius the Tyrant, was already more than three centuries old. An ancient metal door was unlocked and we proceeded into the mouth of a tunnel, guided by prison guards who carried burning torches. The glistening walls cankerous with lime and fungi, the scuttling of the rats in the shadows, the stench of death and waste, the cries and groans of abandoned souls-truly, this was a descent into Hades. Eventually we came to another massive door, and when this was unlocked and unbolted we stepped onto the floor of the prison. What a spectacle greeted our eyes! It was as if some giant had filled a sack with hundreds of manacled men and had then tipped them out into a hole. The light was weak, almost subaquatic, and everywhere, as far as the eye could see, there were prisoners. Some shuffled about, a few huddled in groups, but most lay apart from their fellows, mere yellowing sacks of bones. The day’s dead had not yet been cleared, and it was hard to distinguish the living skeletons from the dead.

We picked our way among the corpses-those that had already died, and those whose end had yet to come: there was no discernible difference-and occasionally Cicero stopped and asked a man his name, bending to catch the whispered reply. We found no Romans, only Sicilians. “Is any man here a Roman citizen?” he demanded loudly. “Have any of you been taken from ships?” There was silence. He turned and called for the captain of the watch and demanded to see the prison records. Like Vibius, the wretch struggled between fear of Verres and fear of the special prosecutor, but eventually he succumbed to Cicero’s pressure.

Built into the rock walls of the quarry were separate special cells and galleries, where torture and execution were carried out, and where the guards ate and slept. (The favored method of execution, we discovered afterwards, was the garrote.) Here, too, was housed the administration of the prison, such as it was. Boxes of damp and musty rolls were fetched out for us, containing long lists of prisoners’ names, with the dates of their arrivals and departures. Some men were recorded as having been released, but against most was scratched the Sicilian word edikaiothesan -meaning “the death penalty was inflicted upon them.”

“I want a copy of every entry for the three years when Verres was governor,” Cicero said to me. “And you,” he said to the prison captain, “when it is done, will sign a statement to say that we have made a true likeness.”

While I and the other two secretaries set to work, Cicero and Lucius searched through the records for Roman names. Although the majority of those held in the quarry during Verres’s time were obviously Sicilian, there was also a considerable proportion of races from all across the Mediterranean-Spaniards, Egyptians, Syrians, Cilicians, Cretans, Dalmatians. When Cicero asked why they had been imprisoned, he was told they were pirates-pirates and spies. All were recorded as having been put to death, among them the infamous pirate captain Heracleo. The Romans, on the other hand, were officially described as “released”-including the two men from Spain, Publius Gavius and Lucius Herennius, whose executions had been described to us.

“These records are nonsense,” said Cicero quietly to Lucius, “the very opposite of the truth. No one saw Heracleo die, although the spectacle of a pirate on the cross invariably draws an enthusiastic crowd. But plenty saw the Romans executed. It looks to me as though Verres simply switched the two about-killed the innocent ships’ crews and freed the pirates, no doubt on payment of a fat ransom. If Gavius and Herennius had discovered his treachery, that would explain why Verres had been so eager to kill them quickly.”

I thought poor Lucius was going to be sick. He had come a long way from his philosophy books in sunlit Rome to find himself studying death lists by the guttering light of candles, eighty feet beneath the dripping earth. We finished as quickly as we could, and never have I been more glad to escape from anywhere than I was to climb the tunnel out of the quarries. A slight breeze had sprung up, blowing in across the sea, and even more than a half century later I remember how we all instinctively turned our faces to it and gratefully drank in that cold, clear air.

“Promise me,” said Lucius after a while, “that if ever you achieve this imperium you desire so much, you will never preside over cruelty and injustice such as this.”

“I swear it,” replied Cicero. “And if ever, my dear Lucius, you should question why good men forsake philosophy to seek power in the real world, promise me in return that you will always remember what you witnessed in the Stone Quarries of Syracuse.”

BY THIS TIME it was late afternoon, and Syracuse, thanks to Cicero’s activities, was in a tumult. The crowd which had followed us up the steep slope to the prison had grown larger, and had been joined by some of the most distinguished citizens of the city, among them the chief priest of Jupiter, all dressed up in his sacred robes. This pontificate, traditionally reserved for the highest-ranking Syracusan, was held presently by none other than Cicero’s client, Heraclius, who had returned privately from Rome to help us, at considerable personal risk. He came with a request that Cicero should immediately accompany him to the city’s senate chamber, where the elders were waiting to give him a formal civic welcome. Cicero was of two minds. He had much work to do, and it was undoubtedly a breach of protocol for a Roman senator to address a local assembly without the permission of the governor. However, it also promised to be a wonderful opportunity to further his inquiries. After a short hesitation, he agreed to go, and we duly set off on foot back down the hill with a huge escort of respectful Sicilians.

The Senate chamber was packed. Beneath a gilded statue of Verres himself, the house’s most senior senator, the venerable Diodorus, welcomed Cicero in Greek and apologized for the fact that they had so far offered him no assistance: not until the events of today had they truly believed he was in earnest. Cicero, also speaking in Greek, and fired up by the scenes he had just witnessed, made a brilliant off-the-cuff speech in which he promised to dedicate his life to righting the injustices done to the people of Sicily. At the end of it, the Syracusan senators voted almost unanimously to rescind their eulogy to Verres (which they swore they had been pressured into by Metellus) and amid loud cheers, several younger members threw ropes around the neck of Verres’s statue and pulled it down. More important, others fetched out of the senate’s secret archives a wealth of new evidence which they had been collecting about Verres’s crimes. These outrages included the theft of twenty-seven priceless portraits from the Temple of Minerva-even the highly decorated doors of the sanctuary had been carried away!-as well as details of all the bribes Verres had demanded to bring in “not guilty” verdicts when he was a judge.