In the teeth of his acquittal, Verres persecuted the man by every form of law which came to his hands as Praetor, but always in opposition to the law.

There is an audacity about the man's proceedings, in his open contempt of the laws which it was his special duty to carry out, making us feel how confident he was that he could carry everything before him in Rome by means of his money.

By robbery and concealing his robberies, by selling his judgments in such a way that he should maintain some reticence by ordinary precaution, he might have made much money, as other governors had done.
But he resolved that it would pay him better to rob everywhere openly, and then, when the day of reckoning came, to buy the judges wholesale.
As to shame at such doings, there was no such feelings left among Romans.
Before he comes to the story of Sthenius, Cicero makes a grandly ironical appeal to the bench before him: "Yes, O judges, keep this man; keep him in the State! Spare him, preserve him so that he, too, may sit with us as a judge here so that he, too, may, with impartiality, advise us, as a Senator, what may be best for us as to peace and war! Not that we need trouble ourselves as to his senatorial duties.

His authority would be nothing.

When would he dare, or when would he care, to come among us?
Unless it might be in the idle month of February, when would a man so idle, so debauched, show himself in the Senate-house?
Let him come and show himself.