and through all of which he had commanded the entire resources of the Commonwealth, except in Spain, he came one day, attended, as usual, by his four-andtwenty lictors, into the Forum. It was too common a sight, perhaps, to attract a crowd; but they who happened to be near by heard him with amazement declare that he had come to lay down his power and retire into private life.103 The lictors were dismissed, and Sulla walked up and down, like any other citizen, amongst the multitude that hurried in to see the strangest spectacle, as it seemed, in all their history. One boy followed the great man home with hootings offensive enough to the majesty of the new citizen to provoke his indignation; 104 but he had abdicated, in the full knowledge that such an affront would be all, nay more than all, the retribution to which he, in the midst of dependants, freedmen, veterans, and magistrates, could be exposed. His retirement, however, showed not only the want of fear on his own part, but the want of hope on the part of his countrymen, or his subjects, as most of them were, in the liberty he had for the time almost annihilated.105 We need not follow him into the debaucheries and the so-called literary pursuits in which he wasted the few remaining months of his life, or repeat the 103 This was near the beginning of A. C. 79. App., Bell. Civ., I. 103. Plut., Sull., 34. 104 App., Bell. Civ., I. 104. 105 "The Roman, when his burning heart Was slaked with blood of Rome, Threw down the dagger, --- dared depart In savage grandeur home. BYRON. loathsome details of his death,106 He was buried in extraordinary pomp, without a regret from those he had most benefited, or a murmur from those yet living whom he had most injured. Yet the memory of Sulla continued for many years to rule the Commonwealth. It was not simply that his adherents, in sustaining his establishments, were sustaining themselves, nor yet alone that the depression he had produced could be followed by no instant recovery; but chiefly because the condition of the Roman world had long been prepared for such a dominion as his, and was now more suited to its existence than to any attempts at restoration. The misery and the confusion wrought during the ten or twenty preceding years have not been half told, nor can they now be wholly described. In the revolving and overturning courses pursued by one party after another at Rome, scarcely an institution in public remained unaltered, scarcely a family in private was left unchanged. A merely political survey of the city might discover that the divisions we long since noticed still endured, and that, though the Knights were deeply humbled by Sulla's triumph, and the Italians partially contented by the issue of the Social War and the succeeding civil contests, there was hardly less separation between these various classes than of yore. At the same time, or rather in continued process of extension, there were other lines of demarcation amongst the higher ranks, 106 He died A. C. 78, at the age Max., IX. 3. 8. App., Bell. Civ., of 59. Plut., Sull., 36, 37. Val. I. 104. drawn long before, but recently or soon made more distinct, between the noble and the ignoble 107 by birth, and the aristocratic and the popular 108 by party; the noble and the aristocratic, generally speaking, being the Senators with their adherents, while the popular and the ignoble were the Knights, whose numbers and authority were shortly revived. As for the crowds in the Forum, to which the name of People is assigned by the historians, it can only be said of them, whether Italians or Romans, free or freedmen, that the throngs once gathered with serious purposes where they now stood, to applaud their heroes or jeer at their offenders,109 would have driven them with scorn from the spot where the Gracchi had been heard and where Virginia had been avenged. But if from these political features, in sketching which we are in advance of the period immediately preceding and following upon Sulla's death, we turn to seek a view of the social or the personal appearance of the Romans, the desperate state of their Commonwealth will be far more evident. Passing by the lower classes, as well the citizens, so styled, whose uproars in the Forum betoken little industry or peace, as the mass of inferior freedmen, slaves, and aliens, 107 Cicero (In Verr. Act. II., V. 70, 71) defines them both. Sallust, in words attributed to Marius (Jug., 85), completes the portraiture. 108 Duo genera semper in hac civitate fuerunt eorum, qui versari in republica . . . . . studuerunt; quibus ex generibus alteri se populares, alteri optimates, et haberi et esse voluerunt." Cic., Pro Sext., 45. 109Illæ undæ comitiorum, ut mare profundum et immensum, effervescunt quodam quasi æstu.” Cic., Pro Planc., 6. See ibid., 4, and Sall., Cat., 38. whose names sufficiently indicate their circumstances, the higher classes alone need be examined. Throughout them all prevailed a frightful corruption, recognized in public as avarice or ambition, luxury or oppression, and in private assuming the shapes which haunt the heart more dreadfully than they can control the frame.110 The closest bonds between man, woman, and child were weak, even with the comparatively virtuous, beneath the pressure of a world enveloped in such an atmosphere of wickedness. Some of the wrongs existing, open or concealed, might be judged natural to the age in which they grew and spread at Rome; but there were others that sprang from the midst of the conquests, or from the results wrought by the conquests, of the nation by which the earth had been subdued and plundered. Great wealth, for instance, was the beginning of most authority or the object of most exertion with the conquerors, as it had been and might still be amongst the conquered; yet nowhere else beneath the sun could the manner of amassing riches have been so dismal to the weak, or the method of using and wasting treasures have been so fatal to the powerful. The illustration might be expanded; it might 110 Open Sallust's history of Catiline at almost any chapter,—5, 11, 13, 24, to read these things in the words of one who beheld and shared them; or, to use Goldsmith's lines, To see ten thousand baneful arts combined 111 Ce ne furent pas leurs richesses," says a late French writer in reference to the Romans, "qui les corrompirent: ce fut la manière dont ils se les étaient procurées." Dunoyer, Liberté du Travail, Livre IV. ch. 4. touch upon the poor man's taxes in the province, the rich man's luxury in his villa 12 or his Roman palace, the tumult of the Forum where riot was paid and murder entitled to a life-long opulence; but the bare outline is, in such a case, sufficient for the finished picture. If any thing be yet needed, the canvas must be turned, and the decrease of wealth, even where it seemed increasing, will be discovered to have been as sure as it was retributive. While the means of consumption were daily multiplying, the means of production were almost hourly dwindling; and so far as the city itself was concerned, the gladiator or the usurer was surer of employment than the laborer or the artisan. The toils of the provinces were the only sources of supply to the indulgences 113 of Rome. The sword had been thrust deeper into the vitals of Italy. Many of her people would be driven to the same desperation that possessed the inhabitants of Norba, a Roman colony in Latium, when they set fire to their town and destroyed their scanty stores rather than be betrayed into the hands of Sulla's soldiers, 114 The colonies of the victorious legions 112 "They have their change of houses, manors, lordships; We scarce a fire or a poor household Lar!" etc. Ben Jonson's Catiline, Act I. sc. 1. This is the contrast; but for the sake of seeing one side, or rather a fragment of one side, the reader may be referred to Becker's Gallus, Scene V. "The Villa." Even Cicero owned ten of these sumptuous residences. See Middleton's Life, p. 294, Moxon's edit, 113 "Corn from Sardinia, herds of Calabrian cattle, meadows through which pleasant Liris glides, silks from Tyrus, and golden chalices to drown my health in," which Bishop Jeremy Taylor reprehends (Holy Living, Ch. II. sect. 6) as "instruments of vanity or sin," would be but the beginning of the Roman's riches. 114 Οἵδε μὲν οὕτως ἐγκρατῶς ἀπέ |