[81-79 B.C.]

The original vice of the provincial administration of the republic consisted in the principle, openly avowed, that the native races were to be regarded as conquered subjects. The whole personnel of the civil and military government of the provinces was literally quartered upon the inhabitants; houses and establishments were provided for it at the cost of the provincials; the proconsul's outfit, or vasarium, was perhaps generally defrayed by a grant from the public treasury, but the sums required for his maintenance, and that of his retinue, known by the name of salarium, was more commonly charged upon the local revenues. The proconsul himself indeed was supposed, in strictness, to serve the commonwealth gratuitously for the honour of the office; but practically he was left to remunerate himself by any indirect means of extortion

he chose to adopt. As the supreme judicial as well as military authority there was no appeal against either the edicts he issued, or the interpretation he put upon them. The legions in occupation of the province were maintained at free quarters, and their daily pay supplied by the contributions of the inhabitants. The landowners were burdened with a tithe or other proportion of their produce, as a tribute to the conquering city. This payment was in most cases made by a composition, in which the proconsul was instructed to drive the hardest bargain he could for his employers. The local revenues were raised for the most part by direct taxes and customs' dues; and these were generally farmed by Roman contractors, who made large fortunes from the transaction. Public opinion at home was such as rather to stimulate than to check their extortions. For it was a settled maxim of Roman policy that every talent extracted from the coffers of the provincial for the enrichment of the ruling caste was the transfer of so much of the

PUNISHMENT OF A TRAITOR

sinews of war to the state from its enemies. But the rulers of the world were not content with the extortion of money from their subjects. An era of taste in art had recently dawned upon the rude conquerors of the East, and every proconsul, quæstor, and legatus was smitten with the desire to bring home trophies of Greek and Asiatic civilisation.

Those among them ambitious of ingratiating themselves with their fellow-citizens sought out the most celebrated statues and pictures, and even the marble columns of edifices, for the decoration of public places in the city. They did not scruple to violate the shrines of the gods, and ransomed rebellious cities for the plunder of their favourite divinities. This thirst for spoil led to acts of abominable cruelty: where persuasion failed, punishments and tortures were unsparingly resorted to; the proconsul and his officials were all bound together in a common cause, and the impunity of the subordinates was repaid by zeal for the interests of the chief. Of those

[81-79 B.C.] who could refrain from open violence, and withhold their hands from the plunder of temples and palaces, few could deny themselves the sordid gains of money-lending usury. The demands of the government were enforced without compunction, and the provincial communities were repeatedly driven to pledge their sources of revenue to Roman capitalists. The law permitted the usurer to recover his dues by the severest process. In a celebrated instance the agent of one of the most honourable men at Rome could shut up the senators of a provincial town in their curia, till five of them actually died of starvation, to recover the debts due to his principal.

When indeed this intolerable tyranny reached its height, the provinces might sometimes enjoy the sweets of revenge, though with little prospect of redress, or of any alleviation of their lot. In a government by parties, the misdeeds of one set of men could not fail to rouse the pretended indignation of another; and while the factions of Rome contended for the prerogatives of conquest, they tried to brand each other with the iniquity of their abuse. The domination of the senators, as established by Sulla, soon provoked the jealous animadversions of their excluded rivals. Their administration of the provinces, protected as it was by the tribunals in which they reigned themselves supreme, presented a vulnerable point of attack, and against the crimes of the senatorial proconsuls the deadliest shafts of the popular orators were directed. The remains of Roman eloquence have preserved to us more than one full-length portrait of a proconsular tyrant. It is impossible indeed to rely upon the fidelity of the colouring, or the correctness even of the lines; nevertheless the general impression they leave upon us is amply borne out by numerous independent testimonies. There is a limit in the possible and the probable even to the rhetorical exaggerations of the Roman demagogues. A slight sketch from one of these pictures may suffice to give us an idea of the frightful originals.

THE CAREER OF VERRES

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About the period of Sulla's abdication, a young noble named Caius Verres accompanied the prætor Dolabella to his government of Cilicia (80). At Sicyon in Achaia, he chose to demand a sum of money of the chief magistrate of the city, and being refused, shut him up in a close chamber with a fire of green wood, to extort the gratuity he required. From the same place he carried off several of the finest statues and paintings. At Athens he shared with his chief the plunder of the temple of Minerva, at Delos that of Apollo; at Chios, Erythræ, Halicarnassus, and elsewhere on the line of his route, he petrated similar acts of rapine. Samos possessed a temple venerated throughout Asia; Verres rifled both the temple and the city itself. The Samians complained to the governor of Asia; they were recommended to carry their complaints to Rome. Perga boasted a statue of Diana, coated with gold; Verres scraped off the gilding. Miletus offered him the escort of one of her finest ships; he detained it for his own use and sold it. At Lampsacus he sought to dishonour the daughter of the first citizen of the place; her father and brother ventured to defend her: one of his attendants was slain. Verres seized the pretext to accuse them both of an attempt on his life, and the Roman governor of the province obliged him by cutting off the heads of both. Such were the atrocities of the young ruffian, while yet a mere dependent of the proconsul, with no charge or office of his own. Being appointed quæstor he extended his exactions over every district of the province, and speedily amassed, by the avowal of his own principal, from two

[75-72 B.C.]

to three million sesterces [about £24,000, or $120,000] beyond the requisitions of the public service.

Verres could now pay for his election to the prætorship in the city. For one year he dispensed his favourable judgments to wealthy suitors at home, and on its termination sailed for the province of Sicily. Here his conduct on the tribunal was marked by the most glaring venality. He sold everything, both his patronage and his decisions, making sport of the laws of the country and of his own edicts, of the religion, the fortunes, and the lives of the provincials. During the three years of his government, not a single senator of the sixty-five cities of the island was elected without a gratuity to the proprætor. He imposed arbitrary requisitions of many hundred thousand bushels of grain upon the communities already over-burdened with their authorised tithes. He distributed cities among his favourites with the air of a Persian despot; Lipara he gave to a boon companion, Segesta to an actress, Herbita to a courtesan. These exactions rapidly depopulated the country. At the period of his arrival, the territory of Leontium possessed eighty-three farms; in the third year of the Verrine administration only thirty-two remained in occupation. At Motya the number of tenanted estates had fallen from 188 to 101, at Herbita from 257 to 120, at Argyrona from 250 to 80. Throughout the province more than one-half of the cultivated lands were abandoned by their miserable owners, as if the scourge of war or pestilence had passed over the island.

But Verres was an amateur and an antiquary, and had a taste for art as well as a thirst for lucre. At every city where he stopped on his progresses he extorted gems, vases, and trinkets from his hosts, or from any inhabitant whom he understood to possess them. No one ventured to complain; there was no redress even for a potentate in alliance with the republic, such as Antiochus, king of Syria, who was thus robbed of a splendid candelabrum enriched with jewels, which he was about to dedicate in the Capitol of Rome. All these objects of art were sent off to Italy to decorate the villa of the proprætor; nor were the antiques and curiosities he amassed less valuable than the ornaments of gold and silver. Finally Verres laid his hands on certain statues of Ceres and Diana, the special objects of worship among the natives, who were only allowed the consolation of coming to offer them their sacrifices in his gardens.

Nor did the extortions of Verres fall upon the Sicilians alone. He cheated the treasury at Rome of the sums advanced to him in payment of corn for the consumption of the city. He withheld the necessary equipments from the fleet which he was directed to send against the pirates, and applied them to his own use. The fleet was worsted by the enemy, and the proprætor caused its officers to be executed for cowardice. His lictors sold to the victims' relatives the miserable favour of despatching them at one blow. He crowned his enormities by punishing one of the ruling caste with death. Gavius, a Roman trader, he confined in the quarries of Syracuse; the man escaped, was retaken, and fastened to a cross on the beach within sight of Italy, that he might address to his native shores his plaintive but ineffectual exclamation, "I am a Roman citizen!"

Such is a specimen of the charges which could be plausibly advanced against a Roman officer, and which the criminal, though backed by the united influence of his party, and defended by the most experienced and successful advocate of his times, shrank from rebutting. In most cases however the governor accused of tyranny or malversation could screen himself by bribing his judges, who besides their natural anxiety to absolve one

[72-69 B.C.] of their own order of crimes which might in turn be imputed to themselves, had been bred in the same school of corruption and venality as himself. The prosecution of these charges became indeed a ready means of acquiring notoriety, and the people, stimulated by their demagogues, encouraged, it was said, the young orators in their attacks, as whelps are trained to hunt down beasts of prey. But the assailants were in almost every case repulsed, and even if successful the provinces themselves reaped no benefit from their efforts. The proconsuls only exerted themselves the more strenuously to grasp the means of securing their acquittal. They could boast that the fruits of three years' occupation of office would suffice- the first to make their own fortunes, the second to reward their advocates and partisans, the third and most abundant to buy the suffrages of their judges. The provinces, it might be anticipated, would soon come forward of their own accord and pray for the repeal of the laws against malversation, since they only served to redouble the extortions of their oppressors.

These frightful iniquities which rendered the dominion of Rome as formidable to the nations in peace as her hostility had been in war, had grown with the progress of luxury and corruption. Her provincial governors had ever wielded their public authority with arrogance and harshness; but in purer and simpler ages they had at least refrained from the sordid exactions and selfish rapacity for which they had now become infamous. The tribunals also had degenerated both in corruption and shamelessness. The knights could venture to assert that during the forty years they had participated in the dispensation of the laws, the justice of Rome had been unstained even by the breath of suspicion. To the notorious venality of the tribunals under the administration of the senate they pointed as a proof of their own superior purity. It was indeed true that the increasing vices of the provincial government were symptomatic of the growing relaxation of morality at home. On the one hand the extension of foreign conquest and the opening in every quarter of new sources of wealth, had inflamed the passions of cupidity and ambition. On the other, half a century of domestic contentions had loosened the bonds of society, overbearing the ancient principles of justice, of respect for law and order, of reverence for things divine. But in fact this greater development of vice was accompanied at the same time by more general publicity, and a more jealous exposure of the faults of political parties. The knights, deterred from the use of force for the recovery of their lost privileges, affected a zeal for justice, to undermine their more fortunate rivals. The constitution of Sulla was assailed and eventually overthrown, not on the field of battle, but on the floor of the law courts.b

WE now enter upon the last stage in the decline and fall of the republic. By a violent effort Sulla had restored the government to the senatorial nobility. But symptoms intimating the insecurity of the fabric which he had hastily reared on blood-bathed foundations showed themselves even before his death. After his secession, Q. Catulus became the chief of the senatorial party. He was son of the Catulus who shared the Cimbrian triumph with Marius, and in the year 79 B.C. he appeared among the candidates for the consulship with the certainty of election. The person who aspired to be his colleague was M. Æmilius Lepidus, a man of illustrious family, but of vain and petulant character. He was supported by many friends, among others by young Pompey. Sulla knew the man, and warned Pompey against entrusting him with power. But Pompey, who already began to talk of "the setting and the rising sun," disregarded the warning, and Lepidus was elected.

Scarcely was Sulla dead when his words were fulfilled. Lepidus declared himself the chief of the Italian party, and promised to restore all that Sulla had taken away. To prevent a renewal of civil war, the senate bound him. and Catulus alike by oath not to take up arms during their consulate. But Lepidus retired to his province of Transalpine Gaul, and, pretending that his oath did not bind him there, began to levy troops. The senate summoned him to return to Rome. He obeyed, but it was at the head of an army. To oppose him, Catulus took post before the Milvian bridge, with Pompey for his lieutenant. Here they were attacked by Lepidus, who was easily defeated. After this failure, he fled to Sardinia, where he died shortly