Page:Cicero And The Fall Of The Roman Republic.djvu/75

70 B.C.] things at home; Verres must have his mansion and his country seats crammed with the spoils of temples and cities. Will you bear any longer, gentlemen of the jury, with the fancies and luxuries of this clown, who by nature and education seems formed in body and mind to be the porter of works of art rather than the collector?" In the meantime the occupation of the Syracusan guides was gone; they used to take strangers round to show the art treasures of the city, now they could only point out the place where each had stood, before the præaetorship of Verres. The end of Verres is characteristic. Condemned and driven into exile, he still clung to some of his darling stolen goods; twenty-seven years later he was in possession of some vases which attracted the attention of Antony, and for their sake Verres' throat was cut in the last great Proscription.

Before leaving this subject I must say a few words on Cicero's treatment of art and art-criticism. We find in his writings all the appreciation of a cultivated gentleman for painting and sculpture; and in his earlier letters to Atticus he continually commissions his friend to purchase statues and bas-reliefs in Greece, and expresses the greatest delight in what Atticus sends him. But in this speech, in order to point the contrast against Verres, he appears as the representative of the sterner and simpler of his countrymen, who regard the new-born interest of the Romans in art as a sign of degeneracy, the lowering of the imperial race to the petty skill and effeminate tastes of the Greek or the Asiatic. The