[218] Ibid. iii. 389; v. 459.
[219] Plato, Respublica, iii. 389.
[220] Idem, Leges, xi. 917. Idem, Respublica, iii. 389.
Not without reason did the Romans of the republican age contrast their own fides with the mendacity of the Greeks and the perfidy of the Phœnicians. “The goddess of faith (of human and social faith),” says Gibbon, “was worshipped, not only in her temples, but in the lives of the Romans; and if that nation was deficient in the more amiable qualities of benevolence and generosity, they astonished the Greeks by their sincere and simple performance of the most burdensome engagements.”[221] Their annals are adorned with signal examples of uprightness, which, though to a great extent fictitious, yet bear testimony to the estimation in which that quality was held.[222] The Greeks had no Regulus who “chose to deliver himself up to a cruel death rather than to falsify his word to the enemy.”[223] The basest forms of falsehood were severely punished by law. According to the Twelve Tables, any one who had slandered or libelled another by imputing to him a wrongful or immoral act, was to be scourged to death,[224] and capital punishment was also inflicted on false witnesses[225] and corrupt judges.[226] However, already before the end of the Republic dishonesty, perjuries, and forgeries became common in Rome.[227]
[221] Gibbon, History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, v. 311.
[222] Cf. Inge, Society in Rome under the Cæsars, p. 33 sq.
[223] Cicero, De officiis, i. 13.
[224] Lex Duodecim Tabularum, viii. 1.
[225] Ibid. viii. 23. Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticæ, xx. i. 53.
[226] Lex Duodecim Tabularum, ix. 3. Aulus Gellius, op. cit. xx. i. 7.