"The manner in which the senate first pampered and rewarded a power like that of Eumenes [king of Pergamus], and enriched it at the expense of its neighbors, then jealously pulled it down the very instant their purpose had been attained, shows not only a total absence of justice, but a want of shame in parading this policy, which astonishes us. Even worse, their usual method of accomplishing this purpose was to set up the son or brother of their ally as a pretender, and let him see that they encouraged this treachery, thus sowing the seeds of crime in families and violating the purest and best feelings of our nature.'

992

The sack of Syracuse, after the expulsion of a Carthaginian garrison in the second Punic war, a garrison which had obtained possession of the fortress without the consent of the people, and after a siege in which most of them favored the Romans, is the most disgraceful affair of the kind in history. The damage done was so great that the city never recovered its former wealth, population, or commerce. This outrage might be charged to the brutality of an army, or to the weakness of a commander, but not so the complete destruction of Carthage and Corinth, two of the most brilliant and prosperous cities of the IInd century B. C. These crimes against humanity were deliberately ordered by the senate, and seem to have been approved by public opinion. Livy, Sallust, and Cicero have no word of condemnation or lament. Alexander destroyed Thebes, but Thebes had wanted to destroy Athens; and besides she was so powerful that Alexander could not safely leave her behind him while he was on his way to Asia. His motive was a reasonable precaution; Rome's, in her fury against Carthage and Corinth, was merę malignity,

The instances of Roman perfidy mentioned in this section, though the most remarkable, are relatively few in a long list, and all of them were ordered or approved, or at least not condemned, by the senate. The ignominy of Rome is increased by the pretenses of such representative authors as Livy and Sallust, that Carthage was preeminent for dishonesty in foreign relations, and that "Punic faith" was the equivalent of perfidy.

Liddell remarks that "the Romans professed not to keep faith with barbarians." Arnold tells us that "in their dealings with foreigners the Romans had neither magnanimity, nor humanity, nor justice." According to Ihne, they had neither "pity nor shame." Merivale observes that "public opinion continued to encourage the most open defiance of every moral obligation in dealing with the enemy in the provinces." And he also says that the treatment of Rhodes was scandalous, and that for the benefit of their own trade, the Romans "were ready to massacre the inhabitants of any [commercial] city." Finlay expresses his detestation of "the lupine ferocity of the race of Romulus." Mommsen says that they carried their brutality to enemies so far that they injured themselves.

SEC. 470. Plunder.-Every main political division of the state outside of Italy, called a province, was subject to a governor, who was selected by the senate from its own members, to serve one year. The main duties of his office were to preserve peace, to act as judge in all cases affecting the rights of Roman citizens, to protect the interests of the republic and of its citizens, and to supervise the collection of the revenue. He had great control over the lives and property of his subjects. In some provinces he collected the taxes by his subordinates; in

others, the collection was made by revenue companies, which had paid or contracted to pay to the state a certain sum for a term of five years.

The governor received no salary, but usually he expected to make a fortune by extortion before the end of his term. He was not subject to any tribunal or authority in the province; and if accused of crime, must be tried in Rome, among his friends and by his friends, where the accusers would be among their enemies. The expense of such a trial was great to the accusers, and the danger to them from later governors was serious.

The tax-contracting companies were systematically guilty of the most cruel oppression. Composed of greedy men, and served in the details of the collection by men of despised classes of society, often freedmen or slaves, they exacted much more than the legal tithe. Those provincials who resisted and appealed to the courts were usually defeated, because the defendants and the judges all belonged to the oppressor class. The companies had senators among their stockholders, and might have great influence upon the fortunes of the judges. The chances of the suit were strongly in favor of the Romans, and the penalty in case of failure was severe for the unfortunate provincials. The general results of the system were that the provinces lost in population and wealth; that the Romans were detested; that there were frequent revolts and assassinations; and that the reports of the defeats of the senatorial party, of the overthrow of the republic by Cæsar, and of the establishment of a monarchical government by Augustus, were received with almost universal satisfaction out of Italy.' "All the provinces [said Cicero] are mourning; all the nations that are free are complaining; every kingdom is expostulating with us

about our covetousness and injustice; there is now no place on this side of the ocean, none so distant, none so out of the way, that in these later times the lust and iniquity of our citizens have not reached it. The Roman people is now no longer able to bear, I do not say the violence, the arms, and the war, but the mourning, the tears, and the complaints of all foreign nations.""

The Romans went to the provinces to make fortunes, and usually intended to collect money quickly by the most dishonest means. The government gave them abundant opportunity to oppress the provincials, and they used their power "without remorse and without satiety." Under their extortions "the most unspeakable misery reigned from the Tagus to the Euphrates." They made themselves “unutterably odious.” The methods adopted by them to compel their subjects to surrender their treasures were inconceivably cruel. Thousands of tillers of the soil who, before they became subjects of Rome, had owned their little farms and lived in simple comfort by honest toil, afterwards, compelled to choose beggary or brigandage, preferred the latter. "In Sardinia and some districts of Asia brigandage was endemic; in Africa and Further Spain it became necessary to fortify all buildings outside of the city inclosures." Many Roman governors favored gangs of robbers, who, by rendering life and property insecure, reduced the price of land and enabled capitalists to buy up extensive tracts, or to acquire legal title by prescriptive occupation during the absence of the former owners. "Like Carthage, Macedonia had provoked the envy, the greed, and the fear of the Romans, and when they obtained the power, they gave free rein to their malignant hatred. They cut up the country into

four divisions, and so isolated them that no inhabitants of one were allowed to acquire property or marry in the next. Of course Roman traders—and here the policy of protecting them by tyranny and oppression first appears who could cross these frontiers soon got all the remaining wealth into their hands, and so great was the wretchedness of the land that bloody raids and insurrections compelled the Romans, twenty-one years after, to reduce it to a direct Roman province. It was all very well to demand [as the Romans did] only half the tax paid to the former kings. The mines were closed, the export of timber prohibited, in fact everything was done, and done but too successfully, to reduce this noble and free people to starvation and ruin." "So long as the senators were the jurymen in cases of extortion, they reigned irresponsibly in the judicial tribunals, screened their friends and condemned their enemies, gorged themselves individually with bribes, and maintained, with relentless tyranny, the system of provincial oppression by which they profited as a class." At those times when the jurymen were taken from the equestrian order, the corruption was not so frightful, but was still abundant and disgraceful. The tax collectors in many of the provinces were knights, who bribed the governors, and thus the jurymen were again members of the class which supplied the criminals and shared their profits. Many senators were secret stockholders in the tax-farming companies, composed ostensibly of knights; and the two orders worked together harmoniously in the provinces, where both had much to lose and nothing to gain pecuniarily by opposition to one another.

The Romans generally who went to the provinces went for plunder, and many of them had friends and rel