Chapter 18.—What the History of
Sallust Reveals Regarding the Life of the Romans, Either When
Straitened by Anxiety or Relaxed in Security.
I will therefore pause, and adduce
the testimony of Sallust himself, whose words in praise of the
Romans (that “equity and virtue prevailed among them not more by
force of laws than of nature”) have given occasion to this
discussion. He was referring to that period immediately after the
expulsion of the kings, in which the city became great in an
incredibly short space of time. And yet this same writer
acknowledges in the first book of his history, in the very exordium
of his work, that even at that time, when a very brief interval had
elapsed after the government had passed from kings to consuls, the
more powerful men began to act unjustly, and occasioned the
defection of the people from the patricians, and other disorders in
the city. For after Sallust had stated that the Romans enjoyed
greater harmony and a purer state of society between the second and
third Punic wars than at any other time, and that the cause of this
was not their love of good order, but their fear lest the peace
they had with Carthage might be broken (this also, as we mentioned, Nasica contemplated when he opposed the destruction of Carthage, for he supposed that fear would tend to repress wickedness, and to preserve wholesome ways of living), he then goes on to say: “Yet, after the destruction of Carthage, discord, avarice, am
bition, and the other vices which are commonly generated
by prosperity, more than ever increased.” If they
“increased,” and that “more than ever,” then already they
had appeared, and had been increasing. And so Sallust adds this
reason for what he said. “For,” he says, “the oppressive
measures of the powerful, and the consequent secessions of the
plebs from the patricians, and other civil dissensions, had existed
from the first, and affairs were administered with equity and
well-tempered justice for no longer a period than the short time
after the expulsion of the kings, while the city was occupied with
the serious Tuscan war and Tarquin’s vengeance.” You see how, even in that brief period after the expulsion of the kings, fear, he acknowledges, was the cause of the interval of equity and good order. They were afraid, in fact, of the war which Tarquin waged against them, after he had been driven from the throne and the city, and had allied himself with the Tuscans. But observe what he adds: “After that, the patricians treated the people as their slaves, ordering them to be scourged or beheaded just as the kings had done, driving them from their holdings, and harshly tyrannizing over those who had no property to lose. The people, overwhelmed by these oppressive measures, and most of all by exorbitant usury, and obliged to contribute both money and personal service to the constant wars, at length took arms and seceded to Mount Aventine and Mount Sacer, and thus obtained for themselves tribunes and protective laws. But it was only the second Punic war that put an end on both sides to discord and strife.” You see what kind of men the Romans were, even so early as a few years after the expulsion of the kings; and it is of these men he says, that “equity and virtue prevailed among them not more by force of law than of nature.”
Now, if these were the days in
which the Roman republic shows fairest and best, what are we to say
or think of the succeeding age, when, to use the words of the same
historian, “changing little by little from the fair and virtuous
city it was, it became utterly wicked and dissolute?” This was, as he mentions, after the destruction of Carthage. Sallust’s brief sum and sketch of this period may be read in his own history, in which he shows how the profligate manners which were propagated by prosperity resulted at last even in civil wars. He says: “And from this time the primitive manners, instead of undergoing an insensible alteration as hitherto they had done, were swept away as by a torrent: the young men were so depraved by luxury and avarice, that it may justly be said that no father had a son who could either preserve his own patrimony, or keep his hands off other men’s.” Sallust adds a number of particulars about the vices of Sylla, and the debased condition of the republic in general; and other writers make similar observations, though in much less striking language.