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The Historians' History of the World 05 [The Roman Republic]
- Автор: Gutenberg
- Год: 1905
- Язык: английский
- Жанр: История
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[75-72 B.C.]
Verres could now pay for his election to the prætorship in the city. For one year he dispensed his favourable judgments to wealthy suitors at home, and on its termination sailed for the province of Sicily. Here his conduct on the tribunal was marked by the most glaring venality. He sold everything, both his patronage and his decisions, making sport of the laws of the country and of his own edicts, of the religion, the fortunes, and the lives of the provincials. During the three years of his government, not a single senator of the sixty-five cities of the island was elected without a gratuity to the proprætor. He imposed arbitrary requisitions of many hundred thousand bushels of grain upon the communities already overburdened with their authorised tithes. He distributed cities among his favourites with the air of a Persian despot; Lipara he gave to a boon companion, Segesta to an actress, Herbita to a courtesan. These exactions rapidly depopulated the country. At the period of his arrival, the territory of Leontium possessed eighty-three farms; in the third year of the Verrine administration only thirty-two remained in occupation. At Motya the number of tenanted estates had fallen from 188 to 101, at Herbita from 257 to 120, at Argyrona from 250 to 80. Throughout the province more than one-half of the cultivated lands were abandoned by their miserable owners, as if the scourge of war or pestilence had passed over the island.
But Verres was an amateur and an antiquary, and had a taste for art as well as a thirst for lucre. At every city where he stopped on his progresses he extorted gems, vases, and trinkets from his hosts, or from any inhabitant whom he understood to possess them. No one ventured to complain; there was no redress even for a potentate in alliance with the republic, such as Antiochus, king of Syria, who was thus robbed of a splendid candelabrum enriched with jewels, which he was about to dedicate in the Capitol of Rome. All these objects of art were sent off to Italy to decorate the villa of the proprætor; nor were the antiques and curiosities he amassed less valuable than the ornaments of gold and silver. Finally Verres laid his hands on certain statues of Ceres and Diana, the special objects of worship among the natives, who were only allowed the consolation of coming to offer them their sacrifices in his gardens.
Nor did the extortions of Verres fall upon the Sicilians alone. He cheated the treasury at Rome of the sums advanced to him in payment of corn for the consumption of the city. He withheld the necessary equipments from the fleet which he was directed to send against the pirates, and applied them to his own use. The fleet was worsted by the enemy, and the proprætor caused its officers to be executed for cowardice. His lictors sold to the victims’ relatives the miserable favour of despatching them at one blow. He crowned his enormities by punishing one of the ruling caste with death. Gavius, a Roman trader, he confined in the quarries of Syracuse; the man escaped, was retaken, and fastened to a cross on the beach within sight of Italy, that he might address to his native shores his plaintive but ineffectual exclamation, “I am a Roman citizen!”
Such is a specimen of the charges which could be plausibly advanced against a Roman officer, and which the criminal, though backed by the united influence of his party, and defended by the most experienced and successful advocate of his times, shrank from rebutting. In most cases however the governor accused of tyranny or malversation could screen himself by bribing his judges, who besides their natural anxiety to absolve one of their own order of crimes which might in turn be imputed to themselves, had been bred in the same school of corruption and venality as himself. The prosecution of these charges became indeed a ready means of acquiring notoriety, and the people, stimulated by their demagogues, encouraged, it was said, the young orators in their attacks, as whelps are trained to hunt down beasts of prey. But the assailants were in almost every case repulsed, and even if successful the provinces themselves reaped no benefit from their efforts. The proconsuls only exerted themselves the more strenuously to grasp the means of securing their acquittal. They could boast that the fruits of three years’ occupation of office would suffice—the first to make their own fortunes, the second to reward their advocates and partisans, the third and most abundant to buy the suffrages of their judges. The provinces, it might be anticipated, would soon come forward of their own accord and pray for the repeal of the laws against malversation, since they only served to redouble the extortions of their oppressors.
[72-69 B.C.]
These frightful iniquities which rendered the dominion of Rome as formidable to the nations in peace as her hostility had been in war, had grown with the progress of luxury and corruption. Her provincial governors had ever wielded their public authority with arrogance and harshness; but in purer and simpler ages they had at least refrained from the sordid exactions and selfish rapacity for which they had now become infamous. The tribunals also had degenerated both in corruption and shamelessness. The knights could venture to assert that during the forty years they had participated in the dispensation of the laws, the justice of Rome had been unstained even by the breath of suspicion. To the notorious venality of the tribunals under the administration of the senate they pointed as a proof of their own superior purity. It was indeed true that the increasing vices of the provincial government were symptomatic of the growing relaxation of morality at home. On the one hand the extension of foreign conquest and the opening in every quarter of new sources of wealth, had inflamed the passions of cupidity and ambition. On the other, half a century of domestic contentions had loosened the bonds of society, overbearing the ancient principles of justice, of respect for law and order, of reverence for things divine. But in fact this greater development of vice was accompanied at the same time by more general publicity, and a more jealous exposure of the faults of political parties. The knights, deterred from the use of force for the recovery of their lost privileges, affected a zeal for justice, to undermine their more fortunate rivals. The constitution of Sulla was assailed and eventually overthrown, not on the field of battle, but on the floor of the law courts.b
FOOTNOTES
[97] [That is, without the consent of the senate.]
[98] [Now that they were dispersed among all the tribes, and thus seemingly deprived of influence in the elections, the Italians could, in reality, if they chose, exercise far greater influence than when confined to a few tribes of their own, which always voted last. In all the assemblies they now stood on an equal footing with the rest of the citizens.]