not merely
notorious but, so to speak, judicially established, that among the
governing lords of Rome everything was treated as venal--the treaty
of peace and the right of intercession, the rampart of the camp and
the life of the soldier; the African had said no more than the simple
truth, when on his departure from Rome he declared that, if he
had only gold enough, he would undertake to buy the city itself.
But the whole external and internal government of this period bore
the same stamp of miserable baseness. In our case the accidental fact,
that the war in Africa is brought nearer to us by means of better
accounts than the other contemporary military and political events,
shifts the true perspective; contemporaries learned by these
revelations nothing but what everybody knew long before and every
intrepid patriot had long been in a position to support by facts.
The circumstance, however, that they were now furnished with some fresh,
still stronger and still more irrefutable, proofs of the baseness of
the restored senatorial government--a baseness only surpassed by its
incapacity--might have been of importance, had there been an opposition
and a public opinion with which the government would have found
it necessary to come to terms. But this war had in fact exposed the
corruption of the government no less than it had revealed the utter
nullity of the opposition. It was not possible to govern worse than
the restoration governed in the years 637-645; it was not possible
to stand forth more defenceless and forlorn than was the Roman
senate in 645: had there been in Rome a real opposition, that is to
say, a party which wished and urged a fundamental alteration of the
constitution, it must necessarily have now made at least an attempt
to overturn the restored senate. No such attempt took place; the
political question was converted into a personal one, the generals
were changed, and one or two useless and unimportant people were
banished. It was thus settled, that the so-called popular party
as such neither could nor would govern; that only two forms of
government were at all possible in Rome, a -tyrannis- or an
oligarchy; that, so long as there happened to be nobody sufficiently
well known, if not sufficiently important, to usurp the regency of
the state, the worst mismanagement endangered at the most individual
oligarchs, but never the oligarchy; that on the other hand, so soon
as such a pretender appeared, nothing