The saga of MPs’ allowances brings to mind the depredations of Gaius Verres, Roman governor of Sicily 73-71 bc.
The saga of MPs’ allowances brings to mind the depredations of Gaius Verres, Roman governor of Sicily 73-71 bc. Not that there is any real comparison between MPs’ money-grubbing and Verres’s ruthless looting of the island on a scale that would draw envious gasps from Robert Mugabe, but the issue they both raise — the trust that can be placed in government — is remarkably similar.
The Sicilian people were represented in court by the young Cicero, aged 36. The foundation of his success was laid by his intensive and detailed research, which took him to Sicily for two months. There he interviewed those whose inheritances had been seized, property removed or daughters violated, and went scrupulously through all Verres’s files.
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