He stripped the ivory ornaments from them, and the golden balls with which they had been made splendid.

He tore off from them the head of the Gorgon and carried it away, leaving them to be rude doors, Goth that he was! And he took the Sappho from the Prytaneum, the work of Silanion! a thing of such beauty that no other man can have the like of it in his own private house; yet Verres has it--a man hardly fit to carry such a work of art as a burden, not possess it as a treasure of his own.

"What, too!" he says, "have you not stolen Paean from the temple of AEsculapius--a statue so remarkable for its beauty, so well-known for the worship attached to it, that all the world has been wont to visit it?
What! has not the image of Aristaeus been taken by you from the temple of Bacchus?
Have you not even stolen the statue of Jupiter Imperator, so sacred in the eyes of all men--that Jupiter which the Greeks call Ourios?
You have not hesitated to rob the temple of Proserpine of the lovely head in Parian marble."[128] Then Cicero speaks of the worship due to all these gods as though he himself believed in their godhead.

As he had begun this chapter with the Mamertines of Messana, so he ends it with an address to them.

"It is well that you should come, you alone out of all the provinces, and praise Verres here in Rome.