at to-day, after so many
centuries, fascinates and appals us.

To satisfy their wants, to pay their debts, the classes now set
upon each other, each to rob in turn the goods of the other, in
the cruelest civil war that history records; now, tired of doing
themselves evil, they unite and precipitate themselves on the world
outside of Italy, to sack the wealth that its owners do not know
how to defend. In the great revolutions of Marius and Sulla,
the democratic party is the instrument with which a part of the
debt-burdened middle classes seek to rehabilitate themselves by
robbing the plutocracy and the aristocracy yet opulent; but Sulla
reverses the situation, makes a coalition of aristocrats and the
miserable of the populace, and re-establishes the fortunes of the
nobility, despoiling the wealthy knights and a part of the middle
classes--a terrible civil war that leaves in Italy a hate, a
despondency, a distress, that seem at a certain moment as if they must
weigh eternally on the spirit of the unhappy nation. When, lo! there
appears the strongest man in the history of Rome, Lucullus, and drags
Italy out of the despondency in which it crouched, leads it into the
ways of the world, and persuades it that the best means of forgetting
the losses and ruin undergone in the civil wars, is to recuperate
on the riches of the cowardly Orientals. As little by little the
treasures of Mithridates, conquered by Lucullus in the Orient, arrive
in Italy, Italy begins anew to divert itself, to construct palaces
and villas, to squander in luxury. Pompey, envious of the glory of
Lucullus, follows his example, conquers Syria, sends new treasures to
Italy, carries from the East the jewels of Mithridates, and displaying
them in the temple of Jove, rouses a passion for gems in the Roman
women; he also builds the first great stone theatre to rise in
Rome. All the political men in Rome try to make money out of foreign
countries: those who cannot, like the great, conquer an empire,
confine themselves to blackmailing the countries and petty states that
tremble before the shadow of Rome; the courts of the secondary kings
of the Orient, the court of the Ptolemies at Alexandria,--all are
invaded by a horde of insatiable senators and knights, who, menacing
and promising, extort money to spend in Italy and foment the growing
extravagance. The debts pile up, the political corruption overflows,
scandals follow, the parties in Rome rend each other madly,