from it their inferiors of the equestrian order, who were striving with equal energy to attain to it; and though a place in the Senate was not hereditary, the sons of senators might commonly expect to be nominated successively to their fathers' places. Hence arose the political conflict of the Senate and the knights, which colors throughout the later history of the free state. The Senate, as the party of the richest and noblest, assumes sometimes the name, as it succeeds to the political character of the patricians; while the knights, with the names of liberty and equality in their mouths, naturally connect themselves for the most part with the inferior and poorer classes, and occupy the place of the plebeians. But if these old names still occur sometimes in the history of constitutional struggles, it must be remembered how far they have really diverged from their original significance.

The struggle for admission to the Senate affected most directly the interests of the competitors. The Senate was the fountain of Roman legislation. The Senate regulated the administration of the provinces, organized the finances of the commonwealth, determined questions of peace and war, and treated with the envoys of foreign potentates. The Senate was thus the executive also of the Roman republic; and to the Senate, rather than to the people, every magistrate at home and abroad was responsible. If its power was limited by the right of intercession or veto of the tribunes, it possessed means of counteracting their opposition by sowing dissension among them and playing off one against another, or, in the last resort, by creating a dictator with arbitrary powers for the protection of the state. The commons frequently complained, and probably with justice, that the pretence of danger from abroad was falsely urged when a dictator was really required to overrule opposition from within. But when the Senate found that the tribunes were manageable without recurring to this unpalatable expedient, it ceased to invoke the strong hand of the dictator. On more than one occasion it attained the same end less offensively by investing the consuls with irresponsible authority to protect the commonwealth. Such a decree, known by the formula, Viderent consules ne aliquid detrimenti res publica caperet, was well entitled a Senatus consultum ultimum. Against even this, however, the people had one defensive weapon in store. No citizen could be sentenced capitally—that is, to the loss either of life or of civil status without an appeal to the people, or permission to withdraw himself therefrom by voluntary exile. If the consuls, under whatever authority, violated this constitutional provision, they were themselves liable to sentence at the hands of the comitia of the tribes. The opposing pretensions of the Senate and the people on

CHAP. XXVI.

PRIVILEGES OF THE SENATORS.

211

this head were never definitively settled, and came more than once into violent collision.

Besides their authority, their influence, and their honorable distinction, the senators enjoyed a monopoly of the most lucrative government appointments. The missions of proconsuls and proprætors, with their inferior officers, were gilded, not, indeed, with fixed salaries, but by gifts from states and potentates, and opportunities, hardly to be resisted, of touching bribes, and peculation. When the rich fields of Greece and Asia were opened to their cupidity, the nobles abandoned usury at home and commerce abroad to more vulgar capitalists, and devoted themselves to the administration of the provinces. They allowed the knights a large share in the occupation of the most fertile domain-land, and confined the poorer classes to the common pastures. When the murmurs of the indigent multitude threatened danger to their privileges, they invented the fatal scheme of satisfying it by a cheap or gratuitous distribution of food. The corn-growing provinces of Sicily and Africa were mulcted in an annual tribute of grain; and while the hunger of the populace was thus appeased, its passion for amusement was at the same time pampered by shows in the theatre and circus, provided by the chief magistrates. The exhibition of these shows was found to be a sure road to popularity, and candidates for office vied with one another in thus invoking the favor of the tribes by an ever-increasing profusion. The cost of proceeding through the regular course of honors, of buying the suffrages of the people by shows and largesses, and eventually by direct bribes, for the quaestorship, the ædileship, the prætorship, and the consulship, advanced almost year by year, and by the time that the aspirant had reached the summit of his ambition he had impoverished himself, and at the same time placed himself under such obligations to his supporters that it was only by the unscrupulous exercise of his advantages in a province that he could hope for indemnification. So it was that the provinces ultimately paid for the voluptuous idleness of the Roman people.

But meanwhile the jealous knights, debarred from these guilty gratifications, kept watch over the conduct of the provincial rulers, and invoked against them the retribution of the laws. Murder, bribery, peculation, and corrupt administration of justice were public crimes, the cognizance of which was reserved to the assembly of the tribes, and this assembly was not indisposed to judge severely the crimes of the nobles and the monopolists. The Senate contrived, with admirable dexterity, to escape from this U.C. 605. hostile judicature by the appointments of the quæstiones 1.0.149. perpetuæ, or permanent tribunals, composed solely of members of

their own order, for the trial of this class of offences. They turned the flank of the knights, and laughed in the face of the people. The knights gradually recovered from their confusion, faced about, and now addressed all their efforts to obtain a share at least in the administration of justice, and so use it as to bring the Senate to terms on the ulterior question of the provincial governments.

CHAPTER XXVII.

State of religion at this period and progress of disbelief in the national system.-The study of the Greek language and literature.-Early histories of Rome written by the Grecian freedmen of the noble houses.-Ennius an imitator of Homer.-Influence of the Grecian women.-Depravation of morals.-Divorces.-Bacchanalian mysteries.-The Romans adopt the forms and rhythms of Greek composition. Further change of manners in the direction of Greek models.-First symptoms of a tendency towards monarchy.-Resistance to foreign corruption by Cato the Censor.

We will turn now from the state of party politics in the city to take a glance at the ideas and manners of the Roman people at this critical period in their history, when the occasional and casual relations they had hitherto entertained with Greece had become fixed and constant, and rapidly increased in close and reciprocal influence. On the side of Rome, with which we are here concerned, this influence is conspicuously apparent in the shape which the old mythology of Italy began now to assume, in the disappearance of many ancient national divinities, and the introduction of Hellenic deities in their place. The Sabine names of Consus, Lunus, Juturna, Feronia, and others become lost altogether, or merged in those of foreign divinities whose attributes are supposed to resemble them. Apollo, first honored with a temple at Rome, A.U.C. 321, advances in estimation among the citizens, U.o. 542. and obtains the distinction of public games in his honB.O. 212. or in the year B.C. 212. Esculapius is evoked from Epidaurus by a decree of the Senate in 291; Cybele, or, as the Romans call her, Bona Dea, is invited to Rome in 205. U.C. 549. The introduction of the Bacchanalia, or mysteries of the Grecian Dionysus, caused so much disturbance or jealousy that the Senate in 186 issued a decree for their suppression throughout Italy. But the sceptical philosophers of Greece followed quickly in the train of her religious ceremonies. The extravagances of belief went, as usual, hand in hand

U.C. 463.

U.C. 568.

CHAP. XXVII.

RELIGION AND LANGUAGE.

213

with scepticism. The poet Ennius introduced the rational explanations of the ancient mythology recommended to his own countrymen by the Greek Evemerus; and from rationalism the step was easy to doubt, and finally to disbelief altogether. The magistrates of Rome maintained the ceremonial of processions, sacrifices, and auguries, as an engine of state policy; but the higher classes almost wholly renounced their fathers' faith in them, and had little scruple in openly deriding them. From the time, indeed, that the plebeians had been admitted to the priesthood and augurships, the nobility of Rome had slackened in their zeal for the maintenance of the old traditions. The Potitii abandoned to their slaves the cult of their patron Hercules. Marcellus threw into the sea the sacred fowls which refused to present him with favorable omens. The common sceptical disposition of the day is represented by the expression of its most popular writer, Ennius: "If there be gods at all, at least they do not concern themselves with the care of human affairs."

At this period the Roman nobles began to make use of the Greek language, and got themselves instructed in it by slaves or clients of Greek extraction. They employed Greek writers to compose their own history for them. Diocles of Peparethus was the first who compiled a narrative of the foundation of the city. The freedmen, to whom was now naturally assigned the task of celebrating the exploits of their patrons' families, were doubtless prompt to embellish them. Hence the rage, already noticed, for discovering a Greek extraction, or a Trojan, which was reputed not less honorable, for the Roman gentes. Eneas and Hercules, with their sons and comrades, were made to serve as founders

for many patrician houses. As soon as the Romans set foot in Phrygia they recognized their pretended connection with the restored city of Ilium. The Scipios and other magnates paid court to Grecian poets and historians, and received the incense of their flattery in return. Ennius, the first of the Roman poets, a native of Calabria, who pretended himself to a Grecian origin, and was equally versed in the Greek and Latin tongues, introduced the works of Homer to the Italians by imitation and translation, and was long held by his grateful countrymen as a worthy rival of the father of epic verse. Instruction in the Greek language and literature became, under the name of Grammar, the most essential part of a liberal education, and every Roman mansion employed its Grecian pedagogue to train the children of the family in this necessary lore. The Greek women, fascinating and accomplished, completed the subjugation of the Roman conquerors. The rough and homely matrons of Sabellia could no longer retain the hearts of their spouses, ensnared during a long absence by the wiles of

these foreign mistresses. The injured women were not slow in avenging themselves. The first divorce at Rome had taken place in the year of the city 520. About half a century later occurred the scandal of the Bacchanalian mysteries, at which many hundreds of Roman matrons are reputed to have devoted themselves to orgies of the grossest licentiousness.

But the invasion of Grecian manners became conspicuous in every department of life. The petty narrowness of the old Roman culture was enlarged in its laws and social institutions. The strict Roman conceptions of marriage and property yielded in many important particulars to a wider and more generous philosophy. But what the Roman principles gained in breadth they lost no doubt in intensity. The cultivation of the ideas of Greece, of her arts and sciences, her moral and intellectual interests, transformed the children of Quirinus into mere cosmopolitans. The Romans abandoned their old Saturnian verse, the native utterance of their sentiment and passion, and deigned to bind themselves in the trammels of the Greek hexameter. At this foreign metre they labored diligently and without repining for more than a century, and in the end created a poetical rhythm and diction hardly if at all inferior to that of their masters, which deserves to be accounted one of the most extraordinary phenomena in all literary history. But they sacrificed no doubt both the spirit and the form of the old Italian inspiration, and we know not how much the national genius may have suffered in consequence. They were hardly less successful in naturalizing the Grecian drama. Enough of the plays of Plautus and Terence survives to show how well they learned to move in the fetters of the Greek Comic Muse; and the names of Livius Andronicus, of Cæcilius, of Attius and Pacuvius, attest, with others, the abundance of this dramatic literature, which we can more complacently admire, inasmuch as it did not supplant any genuine Roman growth of an earlier epoch.

If we take a further glance at the manners and customs of the Romans at this period, we may observe how the life of the city becomes distinguished from that of the country, and that of the Campanian baths from both the one and the other. The first was the life of the Forum and the temples; the stated performance of civil and religious acts; the formal reception of freedmen and giving of legal opinions to clients in the morning; public business in the Forum or Senate-house towards noon; preparation for public speaking with hired rhetoricians; retirement for sleep at mid-day; the exercises of the Campus Martius, swimming, wrestling, and fencing in the afternoon; the supper diversified with singing and buffoonery; and so to bed at sundown. In the country there was the superintendence of the farm and household;