The Statues of Heius of Messana

Cicero begins this account with a sentence typical of the opening of the narrative section of a speech: "Gaius Heius is a Mamertine, and as all who have experience of Messana willingly admit, he is the most honored man in all respects in that state" (II.4.3: C. Heius est Mamertinus—omnes hoc mihi qui Messanam accesserunt facile concedunt—omnibus rebus illa in civitate ornatissimus ).^[37] He then, however, shifts to an unusual tack, focusing on a description of place. He states that

[36] Fuhrmann, "Tecniche narrative," discusses these and other episodes in the Verrines, analyzing the role Cicero, as narrator, assumes. He divides the narratives analyzed into three groups: (1) those in which Verres commits an assault that meets with no resistance, (2) those in which Verres' assault is futilely resisted, and (3) those in which Verres makes an attempt but is successfully repulsed.

[37] Cf. Rosc. Am. 15: Sex. Roscius, pater huiusce, municeps Amerinus fuit, cum genere et nobilitate et pecunia non modo sui municipi verum etiam eius vicinitatis facile primus; Caecin. 10: M. Fulcinius fuit, recuperatores, e municipio Tarquiniensi; qui et domi suae cum primis honestus existimatus est et Romae argentariam non ignobilem fecit.

Heius possessed the finest and best-known house in Messana. Before Verres' advent the house had constituted one of the chief beauties of the town, but now that the house had been stripped bare, the town could take pride only in its situation, walls, and harbor. In this way the orator orients his audience to the setting of what has occurred: the town of Messana, which is the first place the traveler encounters in crossing from the Italian mainland into Sicily, will be the beginning of Cicero's verbal journey throughout the island, cataloguing the crimes committed by the defendant.

Once he has oriented his audience to the town as a whole and the importance within it of Heius and his house, he then reveals that there is a room within the house especially visited and admired, the family shrine. This shrine he describes as an "extremely ancient place" (sacrarium . . . perantiquum ), handed down from Heius's ancestors. The audience then learns the source of its renown: within the sacrarium stood four statues of exceptional beauty—a marble Cupid, an impressive bronze Hercules placed opposite the Cupid (both of which stood behind small altars), and two charming bronze statues of maidens carrying baskets on their heads. Cicero also names the sculptors of the works (albeit with a show of difficulty), giving special attention to the Cupid of Praxiteles. A similar sculpture by the same artist, he states, was the property of the town of Thespiae in Boeotia; when Mummius captured this town he took away all the "profane" statues (II.4.4: profana . . . signa ) but left the Cupid untouched because it had been consecrated. Cicero also notes approvingly that the very statue belonging to Heius had earlier been borrowed and subsequently returned by Gaius Claudius Pulcher at the time of his celebrated aedileship.

In this opening section of the account of Verres' crime (II.4.3–7), Cicero has made use of a familiar narrative technique: "There is a town and within the town is a house and within the house is a room . . ." and so on. Not only does this serve to acquaint the audience with the general setting of the events that will be described, but by suspending mention of the statues it invests them with greater mystery and importance. It should be noted as well that when Cicero does go on actually to describe the statues, he is careful to incorporate in the description both the reason for their renown among outsiders and their value to Heius. Even

idiotae —Verres' term for ordinary Romans like Cicero and his audience (II.4.4–5)—were able to take pleasure in viewing such strikingly beautiful works; for Heius, however, they were not only magnificent statues but sacred objects handed down from his ancestors and worshipped as reverently by himself and his family as the town of Thespiae worshipped the consecrated statues Mummius had piously refused to plunder.

In the second part of the narrative (II.4.8–14) Cicero goes on to confront the contention of the defense that Verres had bought rather than extorted the works from Heius. The charge is rebutted both by evidence (in which Cicero cites the law forbidding such purchases and the accounts stating that Verres had supposedly purchased the statues for an absurdly low sum) and by the argument from probability (depending on Cicero's contention that it was not credible that Heius would give up the statues at all, much less for such a price). In this section Cicero, who claims to place little value on the statues himself, impresses upon the audience both their high value on the open market and their special meaning for Heius.

In the third and longest part of the narrative (II.4.15–28) Cicero explains why the town of Messana had decreed an official eulogy of Verres and why that eulogy had been delivered at the trial by none other than Gaius Heius himself.^[38] His rebuttal of the eulogy is achieved through a twofold strategy. First, he attacks the city itself. We learn that during Verres' governorship Messana had become the center of his criminal activities and had been rewarded for its assistance by exemption from the burdens it normally owed the Roman state. The official eulogy, according to Cicero, was part of a criminal quid pro quo by which Verres and the town profited while many Sicilians and the interests of the Roman state as a whole suffered. This discussion of the town also allows Cicero to remind his audience of two other grave charges expanded on in other parts of the Second Action: namely, that Verres had been derelict in the continuing war against the pirates and that he had illegally executed innocent people, including a Roman citizen who was crucified at Messana.

[38] The matter of official eulogies was clearly an important one, for Cicero confronts the issue at two critical points, the beginning and the end of the oration: he attempts at the outset (II.4.19–25) to vitiate the praise of Verres decreed by Messana, while at the end of the work he includes a lengthy explanation of the motivation and attitude of the inhabitants of Syracuse, supposedly the only other city that had voted a eulogy (II.4.137–44).

Cicero also attempts to discredit the eulogy decreed by Messana through a discussion of the circumstances under which Heius came to deliver it. In the course of this explanation he depicts Heius as a man of high character who, by delivering the eulogy, had carried out the official duties required of him as the chief citizen of Messana, but had refused to falsify the account of his personal dealings with Verres (II.4.16). Throughout, Cicero primarily uses references to Heius's feelings about the statues to reveal Heius's character to his audience. The objects taken by Verres are seen by Heius as "holy things" (II.4.17: sacra ) handed down from his forebears and as "the household gods of his ancestors" (II.4.17: deos penatis . . . patrios ). He humbly acquiesces in the loss of what are merely precious works of art, but—referring to the marble Cupid and the bronze Hercules—he demands that the "images of the gods" (II.4.18: deorum simulacra ) be returned. In this way Cicero establishes Heius's spiritual communion with the Roman senators who sat on the jury and who would have understood implicitly the familial piety that motivated Heius. The orator also draws in clear outlines the ethical opposition between Verres, a man with no shame, no sense of piety, and no fear (II.4.18: pudor/religio/metus ), who has not hesitated to rob from his host's sacrarium the images of the gods, and Heius, whose sense of religio has led him both to fulfill the odious duties required of him in praising Verres (II.4.16: de religione sua ac dignitate ) and to demand the restitution of the paternal gods he piously worships (II.4.18: quia religioni suae . . . in dis patriis repetendis . . . proximus fuit ).

In this narrative, the description of Heius's stolen statues has provided the focus for the passage as a whole. The statues—and that of Cupid in particular—constitute the visual images that will ultimately symbolize the ideas, arguments, and themes of the entire narrative. The audience is first prepared to anticipate eagerly the reference to the statues and then to visualize them through Cicero's description. They are then led by the orator to attach to that visualization a stream of ideas associated with the story of the theft of the statues—ideas concerning Verres' greed, Heius's nobility and piety, and the criminal complicity of the town of Messana.