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While in many districts of Italy the rural population was swept away, and the country was desolated, the senators, army contractors, tax gatherers, and money lenders of Rome, were accumulating vast fortunes, which enabled them to buy up or occupy the devastated tracts, and to fill them with slaves, who were brought in myriads from Africa, Epirus, Greece, Asia, Africa, Sardinia, Spain, and Gaul. The peninsula, which three or four centuries before had possessed millions of farmers, each owning and tilling his little tract, now had only some thousands.

The slaves became numerous in the capital as well as in the rural districts. About 130 B. C. a remark in the Forum by Scipio, the destroyer of Carthage, having provoked an angry protest from the populace within hearing, the speaker called out, "Silence, ye stepsons of Italy; remember who brought you here in chains." He thus insinuated that many of the men before him had been enslaved by his armies and afterwards emancipated. And the story is told as if the crowd submitted in silence to the correction; perhaps the freemen were ashamed of their company, and the freedmen afraid to make themselves conspicuous.

In addition to changes in the legislative and police departments of the government, the reforms most needed in Rome were the equalization of industrial and political rights, the freedom of industrial occupation for senators, the payment of the expense of the public games by the public treasury, the payment of salaries to all executive officials, and the suppression of pauperism among the class able to support themselves.

The only important reformatory measure that found prominent advocates in Rome was the extension of the Roman citizenship; but the motive of the exceptional

zeal in this direction was perhaps not so much a desire to do equal justice as to catch numerous votes. The politician who could give the franchise to several hundred thousand men might count with confidence on their partisan attachment to him.

In no other civilized community has the greed for money shown itself more offensively; in no other has the separation been wider between legal privilege and moral right; in no other did the dominant class look with more contempt on the demands of justice; and in no other can we find more conclusive proof that for the happy constitution of society, the mere outward forms of law are of less value than the public spirit which knows how to develop a sound social condition.

Cicero and other learned and able statesmen of his time evidently had no hope that the main political abuses of the republic would be corrected while they lived. Their highest ambition was to postpone the day which was to witness the final overthrow of senatorial rule. They foresaw that the end must be a monarchy, which they supposed would not be durably established until after scenes of disorder and massacre, similar to those which had disgraced the reigns of Marius and Sulla.

One of the most important objects of national economy is to establish a sound system of land tenure, under which the area of the state shall be divided among a multitude of farmers, each owning in fee, and tilling by his own labor, a tract not much larger than is sufficient to maintain his family in comfort, and to educate his children in a manner that will qualify them to perform their duties as citizens and members of society with credit to themselves.

But no comprehensive plan for the establishment of

such a system of land tenure was proposed in Rome. The main purpose of the agrarian laws was to give to the commoners tracts not to be occupied but to be sold by them. Tiberius Gracchus, when trying to get the support of some of his noble relatives, inserted in his agrarian bill a clause that the land should be forfeited to the state when abandoned by the grantee, but this clause was repealed because it offended the rabble, who wanted land not to occupy but to sell.

We cannot understand the fact that the nobles, including the senators, were almost unanimous in their opposition to the agrarian bills, unless we suppose that all these bills were designed to benefit a class at the expense of the state. Among the senators there were able statesmen and sincere patriots in every age. Such a man was Cicero, and he had a number of senatorial supporters; yet he and they were enemies of all the agrarian agitators. Neither Tiberius nor Caius Gracchus had any senator of note, unless a near relative, among his supporters, and although each carried his bill, no party in the senate wanted its enforcement.

The military was the only department in which the late republic was not miserably deficient. Though the discipline was relaxed and the material inferior, the martial traditions had enough influence to make excellent fighters. A brutal populace may make a formidable soldiery. Fortunately for Marius, Sulla, Pompey, and Cæsar, in their foreign wars they encountered no great army under a great general. The Greeks were not united; the Gauls and Teutons were not well drilled nor well commanded.

SEC. 469. Perfidy. Of all civilized governments that of the Roman republic was the most perfidious in its

foreign policy. No other powerful state has ever approached it in the systematic disregard of the obligations of truth and justice to other nations. The base treatment of Carthage in the acquisition of Sardinia and in the third Punic war has been described briefly in sections 450 and 455. Some other examples of Roman faithlessness deserve mention here.

When the Romans were ready to appropriate the territory of Numidia, they declared war against King Jugurtha, who had been a most useful ally to them. Having defeated him, they consented to grant him peace if he would surrender all his elephants, a great number of horses, and a large stock of arms, and would pay a war indemnity of about $2,500,000. Jugurtha accepted the conditions and complied with them, supposing that he would then be left in possession of his dominions, as an allied or subject prince. But this was only a beginning. He was ordered to surrender all the Roman and Italian deserters, who had been an efficient part of his army. Having given up most of his weapons, he complied with this demand. Next he was ordered to surrender himself. This was too much. He again called on his people to fight, and kept up the war until the Romans, by bribery, induced his father-in-law to seize and surrender him. He was then starved to death.

At a conference of two Roman commissioners with the senate of the Achæan League, the ambassadors accused the leading Achæans of scheming to make war against Rome. One of the Achæans denied the charge and said he was ready to be tried on that accusation either in Achæa or in Rome. Thereupon one of the Romans replied that he and other prominent Achæans should go to Rome to be tried before the senate. Rather than bring

the disasters of a hopeless war on their country, the Achæans went. The list, as prepared by the Romans, included all the men noted for political and military experience or for influence among the people. The promise of a trial was never kept. The accused were treated as if already convicted. They were detained in Etruria, where most of them died, and, after a lapse of seventeen years, three hundred survivors were permitted to return to Greece, where they contributed to increase the detestation with which the Romans were regarded throughout the provinces. Of these distinguished Achæans, whom the Romans could not have taken from their country without a deceitful concealment of their purpose, Polybius was one, and he became the first historian of Rome whose works have been at least partially preserved to our time.

After King Perseus had been conquered, the consul Paullus Æmilius sent word to those Epirotic cities which had been allies of Macedonia in the war, that he would spare them if they would deliver to him all the gold and silver which they possessed, either as private or as public property. They accepted his offer, and he sent a small army into every city to receive the treasure. When it had been delivered, the soldiers plundered all the dwellings, and sold 150,000 of the people into slavery.1

In 136 B. C., after consul Mancinus had been defeated, with a loss of 10,000 men, by the Numantines, and was in great danger of being cut off with the remaining 20,000, he made a treaty, to which he and all his principal officers pledged the faith of Rome by their oaths. The senate repudiated the obligations of the treaty after they had obtained its benefits, and sent Mancinus to Numantium to be slain for having violated his promise.

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