Cicero, Verrines

Catalog description

Our aims are to understand and translate Cicero’s Against Verres II4 (‘On the Statues’), and to study its historical, legal, and cultural background—not only the laws that were broken and the legal procedures, rhetorical strategies and performative displays for winning the case (but never ‘used’ since the speech was never delivered), but also the concept of cultural theft that impels Cicero’s argument and that has exerted so great an influence in later centuries. We shall, as time permits, consider the influence of the Verrines on Edmund Burke in his prosecution of Warren Hastings (1787-1794), so much so that accounts of Verres’ enormities in Sicily became comparative material for the contemporary trial of Hastings in London newspapers; and also their influence on the first international law code recognizing cultural property (the ‘Lieber Code’, 1863) as a protected category in war.