Caesar: A Sketch | Page 9

and
wholesome manners of life among the early Romans had given them
vigorous minds in vigorous bodies. The animal nature had grown as
strongly as the moral nature, and along with it the animal appetites; and
when appetites burst their traditionary restraints, and man in himself
has no other notion of enjoyment beyond bodily pleasure, he may pass

by an easy transition into a mere powerful brute. And thus it happened
with the higher classes at Rome after the destruction of Carthage. Italy
had fallen to them by natural and wholesome expansion; but from
being sovereigns of Italy, they became a race of imperial conquerors.
Suddenly, and in comparatively a few years after the one power was
gone which could resist them, they became the actual or virtual rulers
of the entire circuit of the Mediterranean. The south-east of Spain, the
coast of France from the Pyrenees to Nice, the north of Italy, Illyria and
Greece, Sardinia, Sicily, and the Greek Islands, the southern and
western shores of Asia Minor, were Roman provinces, governed
directly under Roman magistrates. On the African side Mauritania
(Morocco) was still free. Numidia (the modern Algeria) retained its
native dynasty, but was a Roman dependency. The Carthaginian
dominions, Tunis and Tripoli, had been annexed to the Empire. The
interior of Asia Minor up to the Euphrates, with Syria and Egypt, were
under sovereigns called Allies, but, like the native princes in India,
subject to a Roman protectorate. Over this enormous territory, rich with
the accumulated treasures of centuries, and inhabited by thriving,
industrious races, the energetic Roman men of business had spread and
settled themselves, gathering into their hands the trade, the financial
administration, the entire commercial control of the Mediterranean
basin. They had been trained in thrift and economy, in abhorrence of
debt, in strictest habits of close and careful management. Their frugal
education, their early lessons in the value of money, good and excellent
as those lessons were, led them, as a matter of course, to turn to account
their extraordinary opportunities. Governors with their staffs,
permanent officials, contractors for the revenue, negotiators,
bill-brokers, bankers, merchants, were scattered everywhere in
thousands. Money poured in upon them in rolling streams of gold. The
largest share of the spoils fell to the Senate and the senatorial families.
The Senate was the permanent Council of State, and was the real
administrator of the Empire. The Senate had the control of the treasury,
conducted the public policy, appointed from its own ranks the
governors of the provinces. It was patrician in sentiment, but not
necessarily patrician in composition. The members of it had virtually
been elected for life by the people, and were almost entirely those who
had been quaestors, aediles, praetors, or consuls; and these offices had

been long open to the plebeians. It was an aristocracy, in theory a real
one, but tending to become, as civilization went forward, an aristocracy
of the rich. How the senatorial privileges affected the management of
the provinces will be seen more particularly as we go on. It is enough at
present to say that the nobles and great commoners of Rome rapidly
found themselves in possession of revenues which their fathers could
not have imagined in their dreams, and money in the stage of progress
at which Rome had arrived was convertible into power.
The opportunities opened for men to advance their fortunes in other
parts of the world drained Italy of many of its most enterprising citizens.
The grandsons of the yeomen who had held at bay Pyrrhus and
Hannibal sold their farms and went away. The small holdings merged
rapidly into large estates bought up by the Roman capitalists. At the
final settlement of Italy, some millions of acres had been reserved to
the State as public property. The "public land," as the reserved portion
was called, had been leased on easy terms to families with political
influence, and by lapse of time, by connivance and right of occupation,
these families were beginning to regard their tenures as their private
property, and to treat them as lords of manors in England have treated
the "commons." Thus everywhere the small farmers were disappearing,
and the soil of Italy was fast passing into the hands of a few territorial
magnates, who, unfortunately (for it tended to aggravate the mischief),
were enabled by another cause to turn their vast possessions to
advantage. The conquest of the world had turned the flower of the
defeated nations into slaves. The prisoners taken either after a battle or
when cities surrendered unconditionally were bought up steadily by
contractors who followed in the rear of the Roman armies. They were
not ignorant like the negroes, but trained, useful, and often educated
men, Asiatics, Greeks, Thracians, Gauls, and Spaniards, able at once to
turn their hands