They kept me waiting in an antechamber while they searched for Verres’s records, and eventually they brought out to me a single document case containing perhaps a dozen rolls. From the labels on the ends I saw that these were all, with one exception, accounts from his time as urban praetor. The exception was a flimsy piece of papyrus, barely worth the trouble of unrolling, covering his work as a junior magistrate twelve years previously, at the time of the war between Marius and Sulla, and on which was written just three sentences: “I received 2,235,417 sesterces. I expended on wages, grain, payments to legates, the proquaestor, the praetorian cohort 1,635,417 sesterces. I left 600,000 at Ariminum.” Remembering the scores of rolls of meticulous accounts which Cicero ’s term as a junior magistrate in Sicily had generated, all of which I had written out for him, I could barely refrain from laughing.

“Is this all there is?”

The attendant assured me it was.

“But where are the accounts from his time in Sicily?”

“They have not yet been submitted to the Treasury.”

“Not yet submitted? He has been governor for almost two years!”

The fellow looked at me blankly, and I could see that there was no point in wasting any more time with him. I copied out the three lines relating to Verres’s junior magistracy and went out into the evening.

While I had been in the National Archive, darkness had fallen over Rome. In Cicero ’s house the family had already gone in to dinner. But the master had left instructions with the steward, Eros, that I was to be shown straight into the dining room the moment I returned. I found him lying on a couch beside Terentia. His brother, Quintus, was also there, with his wife, Pomponia.