imself. We can see these children
playing on the very edge of the crater, like the French noblesse
before the Revolution. In both cases there was a semi-consciousness
that the eruption was not far off,--but they went on playing. What was
it that so greatly amused and pleased them?

What Caelius is always writing of is mainly elections and canvassing,
accusations and trials, games and shows. Elections he treats as pure
sport, as a kind of enjoyable gambling, or as a means of spiting some
one whom you want to annoy. With elections accusations were often
connected: if a man were accused before his election he could not
continue to stand; if condemned after it he was disqualified; here
were ways in which personal spite might deprive him of success at the
last moment.[201] Accusations, too were of course the best means by
which an ambitious young man could come to the front. The whole number
of trials mentioned by Caelius is astonishing; sometimes there is such
a complication of them as is difficult to follow. Every one is ready
to lay an accusation, without the smallest regard for truth. Young
Appius Claudius accuses Servilius, and makes a mess of the attack,
while the praetor mismanages the conduct of the trial, so that nothing
comes of it; but finally Appius is himself accused by the Servilii
_de vi_, in order to keep him from further attacks on Servilius![202]
Appius the father quarrelled with Caelius and egged on others to
accuse him, though he was curule aedile at the time. "Their impudence
was so boundless that they secured that an information should be
laid against me for a very serious crime (under the Scantinian law).
Scarcely had Pola got the words out of his mouth, when I laid an
information under the same law against the censor, Appius. I never saw
a more successful stroke!"[203]

Of the games, and the panthers to be exhibited at them, about which
Caelius is for ever worrying his friend in Cilicia, we shall see
something in another chapter. There is plenty of other gossip in these
letters, and gossip often about unsavoury matters which need not be
noticed here. It lets in a flood of light upon the causes of the
general incompetence and inefficiency; the life of the Forum was a
demoralising one:

Uni se atque eidem studio omnes dedere et arti
uerba dare ut caute possint, pugnare dolose:
blanditia certare, bonum simulare uirum se:
insidias facere, ut si hostes sint omnibus omnes.[204]

From what has