Sylla believed he had re-established the Republic on its ancient basis, but, instead, he had thrown everything into disorder. The property, the life even of each citizen, was at the mercy of the stronger; the people had lost the right of appeal, and their legitimate share in the elections; the poor, the distribution of wheat; the tribuneship, its secular privileges; and the influential order of the knights, their political and financial importance.
At Rome, no more guarantee for justice; in Italy, no more security for the rights of citizenship, so dearly acquired; in the provinces, no more consideration for subjects and allies. Sylla had restored their prerogatives to the upper class without being able to restore their former prestige; having made use of only corrupt elements, and appealed to only sordid passions, he left behind him a powerless oligarchy, and a thoroughly distracted people. The country was divided between those whom his tyranny had enriched and those whom it had despoiled; the one fearing to lose what they had just acquired, the other hoping to regain what they had lost.
The aristocracy, proud of their wealth and ancestry, absorbed in all the pleasures of luxury, kept the new men[829] out of the highest offices, and, by a long continuance of power, had come to look on the chief magistracies as their property. Cato, in a discourse to the Senate, exclaimed:—“Instead of the virtues of our ancestors we have luxury and avarice; the poverty of the State, and the opulence of individuals; we boast of our riches, we cherish idleness; no distinction is made between the good and the wicked; all rewards due to merit are the price of intrigue. Why then are we astonished at this, since each man, isolating himself from the rest, consults only his own interest? At home, the slaves of pleasure; here, of wealth or of favour.”[830]
The elections had for a long time been the result of a shameless traffic, where every mean of success was allowable. Lucullus himself, to obtain the government of Asia, did not blush to have recourse to the good offices of a courtesan, the mistress of Cethegus.[831] The sale of consciences had so planted itself in public morals, that the several instruments of electoral corruption had functions and titles almost recognised. Those who bought votes were called divisores; the go-betweens were interpretes; and those with whom was deposited the purchase money[832] were sequestres. Numerous secret societies were formed for making a trade of the right of suffrage; they were divided into decuries, the several heads of which obeyed a supreme head, who treated with the candidates and sold the votes of the associates, either for money, or on the stipulation of certain advantages for himself or his friends. These societies carried most of the elections, and Cicero himself, who so often boasted of the unanimity with which he had been chosen consul, owed to them a great part of the suffrages he obtained.[833]
All the sentences of the tribunals composed of senators were dictated by a venality so flagrant, that Cicero brands it in these terms:—“I will demonstrate by positive proofs the guilty intrigues, the infamies which have sullied the judicial powers for the ten years that they have been entrusted to the Senate. The Roman people shall learn from me how the knightly order has administered justice for nearly fifty consecutive years, without the faintest suspicion resting on any of its members of having received money for a judgment delivered; how, since senators alone have composed our tribunals, since the people have been despoiled of the right which they had over each of us, Q. Calidius has been able to say, after his condemnation, that they could not honestly require less than 300,000 sestertii to condemn a prætor; how, when the senator P. Septimius was found guilty of embezzlement before the prætor Hortensius, the money he had received in his quality of judge was included in his fine; how C. Herennius and C. Popilius, both senators, having been convicted of the crime of peculation, and M. Atilius of the crime of high treason, it was proved that they had received money as the price of one of their sentences; how it was found that certain senators, when their names were taken from the urn held by C. Verres, then prætor urbanus, instantly went to vote against the accused, without having heard the suit; how, finally, we have seen a senator, judge in this same suit, receive money from the accused to distribute to the other judges, and money from the accuser to condemn the accused. Can I, then, sufficiently deplore this blot, this shame, this calamity which weighs on the whole order?”[834]
Notwithstanding the severity of the laws against the avidity of the generals and farmers of the revenues, notwithstanding the patronage of the great at Rome, the conquered peoples[835] were always a prey to the exactions of the magistrates, and Verres was a type of the most shameless immorality, which drew this exclamation from Cicero: “All the provinces groan; all free peoples lament; all the kingdoms cry out against our cupidity and our violence. There is not between the Ocean and ourselves a spot so remote or so little known that the injustice and tyranny of our fellow-citizens of these days have not penetrated to it.”[836] The inhabitants of foreign countries were obliged to borrow, either to satisfy the immoderate demands of their governors and their retinue, or to pay the farmers of the public revenues. Now, capital being nowhere but at Rome, they could only procure it at an excessive rate of interest; and the nobles, giving themselves up to usury, held the provinces in their power.
The army itself had been demoralised by civil wars, and the chiefs no longer maintained discipline. “Flamininus, Aquilius, Paulus Æmilius,” says Dio Cassius, “commanded men well disciplined, who had learnt to execute the orders of their generals in silence. The law was their rule; with a royal soul, simple in life, bounding their expenses within reasonable limits, they held it more shameful to flatter the soldiery than to fear the enemy. From the time of Sylla, on the contrary, the generals, raised to the first rank by violence and not by merit, forced to turn their arms against each other rather than against the enemy, were reduced to court popularity. Charged with the command, they squandered gold to procure enjoyments for an army, the fatigues of which they paid dearly; they rendered their country venal, without caring for it; and made themselves the slaves of the most depraved men, to bring under their authority those who were worth more than themselves. This is what drove Marius out of Rome, and led him back against Sylla; this is what made Cinna the murderer of Octavius, and Fimbria the murderer of Flaccus. Sylla was the principal cause of these evils, he who, to seduce the soldiers enrolled under other chiefs, and bring them under his own flag, scattered gold in handfuls among his army.”[837]
Far were they from the times when the soldier, after a short campaign, laid down his arms to take up the plough again; since then, retained under his standards for long years, and returning in the train of a victorious general to vote in the Campus Martius, the citizen had disappeared; there remained the warrior, with the sole inspiration of the camp. At the end of the expeditions, the army was disbanded, and Italy thus found itself overrun with an immense number of veterans, united in colonies or dispersed over the territory, more inclined to follow a leader than to obey the law. The veterans of the ancient legions of Marius and Sylla were to be counted by hundreds of thousands.
A State, moreover, is often weakened by an exaggeration of the principle on which it rests; and as war was the chief occupation at Rome, all the institutions had originally a military character. The consuls, the first magistrates of the Republic, elected by centuries—that is to say, by the people voting under arms—commanded the troops. The army, composed of all there was most honourable in the nation, did not take an oath to the Republic, but to the chief who recruited it and led it against the enemy; this oath, religiously kept, rendered the generals the absolute masters of their soldiers, who, in their turn, decreed to them the title of Imperator after a victory: what more natural, then, even after the transformation of society, than that these soldiers should believe themselves the real people, and the generals elected by them the legitimate chiefs of the Republic? Every abuse has deep roots in the past, and we may find the original cause of the power of the prætorians under the emperors in the primitive organisation and functions of the centuries established by Servius Tullius.
Although the army had not as yet acquired this preponderance, it nevertheless weighed heavily on the decisions of the Forum. By the side of men habituated to the noble chances of the fight existed a true army of turbulence, kept at the expense of the State or of private persons, in the principal towns of Italy—above all, at Capua: these were the gladiators, ever ready to undertake anything for those who paid them, either in the electoral contests[838] or as soldiers in the times of civil war.[839]