The Historians' History of the World 05

It was not till after the destruction of Carthage, when on the one hand the commons had greatly increased in numbers (in the municipal towns and colonies as well as in Rome) as compared with the ruling or senatorial class, and the poorer portion of the former class had congregated in the capital, and when, on the other hand, discontent was rife in the Italian confederacy; when the senate was falling more and more under the control of a limited number of noble families, who appropriated the major part of the advantages accruing from the enforced exertions of subject provinces, leaving a share in the profits to such members of the knightly class only as came forward in the character of publicani or negotiatores, and to them not enough to satisfy their cupidity—that the tribunate of the plebs assumed the character of an opposition pure and simple, a character which became more strongly marked after the time of the Gracchi. It developed a legislative activity which, however we may judge of the objects that individual statesmen had in view—as to ameliorate the condition of the poorer citizens by the allotment of arable land or the distribution of corn at reduced prices, to limit the arbitrary power of the magistrates or of the senate, to prevent the excessive concentration of government influence and authority, to promote the movement in favour of equal rights among the members of the confederacy, to appoint particular persons for the conduct of public affairs especially in the case of military command—could not but have a pernicious effect, because, forcibly dissociated from the senate, it was by its very nature in the hands of individuals distinguished by the accident of an official tenure liable to annual change and dependent on popular favour.

After a series of conflicts and violent political measures (inaugurated by the Gracchi, Saturninus, and others) and a short-lived victory of the democratic party under Marius and Cinna, a reaction in favour of aristocracy combined with the military dictatorship of an individual set in under Sulla, the ancient boundary lines of state and people having been swept away by the outcome of the Social War. The cardinal points of this reaction were the abolition of the initiative of the tribunate, and the strengthening of senatorial influence by appointing none but senators to magisterial office.

But this reaction, though carried through with ruthless severity, was the less capable of holding its ground from the fact that the old forms in which it was embodied were absolutely unsuited to the dimensions of the state and the geographical distribution of the people under the radical change of conditions brought about by the Social War. After the lapse of ten years the rights of the tribunate were restored. But from that time forth it placed itself at the head of the democratic and turbulent elements in the capital and its immediate neighbourhood, and so became a mere instrument in the hands of individual despots who attempted (sometimes by wealth, but more generally by deeds of arms and popularity with the soldiery) to build up a personal sway before which the tottering authority of the senate was forced to bow, in spite of the resistance offered by the aristocrats who (like Catulus and Hortensius) maintained the principles of Sulla, and of men who (like Cicero) based their influence on services of a peaceful character.

At length, having endured a civil war between the leaders of opposing factions, weary of discord and of struggles in which all political institutions had sunk to the level of empty and impotent forms liable to perpetual violation and abuse, the state found under an autocracy the repose and external order which the vast majority of the inhabitants of Italy were not unwilling to accept in exchange for a political life from participation in which they must have been virtually excluded, to a great extent, by the inadequacy of the forms in which it was embodied.b