Page:Cicero And The Fall Of The Roman Republic.djvu/74

56 presence of the goddess herself, all was swept into his net. Sometimes he added insult to injury by compelling his victims to accept a trumpery sum, as purchase money for their ancestral heirlooms or for the tutelary gods of their cities. He appropriated even the statues which the Carthaginian conquerors in former days had carried from Sicily and which Scipio had restored, as a monument of the magnanimity of Rome, to their first possessors. The bases with the name of Scipio alone remained to tell the story. The historic pictures on the walls of the temple of Pallas at Syracuse were torn from their site; the gates of the same temple, supposed to be the finest in the world, were stripped of their embossed gold and ivory, and their marvellous Gorgon's head. Of the statue of Sappho from the prytaneum of Syracuse Cicero says, "this gave you so fair an excuse that one is almost obliged to allow it. This masterpiece of Selanion, so perfect, so graceful, so exquisite, how should it be in the possession of any individual or of any State, saving only of our most elegant and accomplished Verres? Any one of us, not born to such good fortune, has no business to be particular; if he wants to look at anything of the sort, let him go to the Temple of Happiness, to the Monument of Catulus, to the Portico of Metellus; or let him bestir himself to obtain admission to the suburban villa of one of you fine gentlemen; or let him content himself with the sight of the Forum, if Verres lends any of his treasures to the ædiles to decorate it on great occasions. But Verres must have these