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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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An event, however, occurred which smoothed the way for Cotta’s law. Cicero, after the great credit he had won by his bold defence of Sext. Roscius, had quitted Rome for two years. He returned in 77 B.C., and immediately began to dispute with Hortensius the sway which he exercised in the law courts. Except during the year 75 B.C., when he was serving as quæstor in Sicily, he was employed as an advocate at Rome. His polished eloquence excited universal admiration; his defence of many wealthy clients brought him in much money and connected him with many powerful families. He was of the same age as Pompey; and, being now a candidate for the ædileship, he began to be eager for political distinction. To obtain this by military commands was not suited to his tastes or talents. But it was possible to achieve it by the public impeachment of some powerful offender. C. Cornelius Verres, a man connected with some of the highest senatorial families, had for three years been prætor of Sicily, from which province he had returned after practising extortions and iniquities unexampled even in those days. The Sicilians, remembering the industry and equity with which Cicero had lately executed the functions of quæstor in their island, begged him to come forward as the accuser of this man; and the orator, who saw how he might at once strengthen the hands of Pompey and share the popular triumph of the consul, readily undertook the cause.
The first attempt which the dexterous advocate of Verres made to elude Cicero’s attack was to put forward Q. Cæcilius Niger, who had been quæstor under Verres, to contend that to him belonged the task of accusation. But Cicero exposed the intended fraud so unanswerably that even the senatorial jurymen named Cicero as prosecutor. He demanded ninety days for the purpose of collecting evidence in Sicily. But he only used fifty of them, and on the fifth of August he opened this famous impeachment. He had in the meantime been elected ædile. But Hortensius had also become consul-elect; and one of the Metelli, a warm friend of the accused, was designated to succeed Glabrio, who now presided in the court as prætor peregrinus. It was therefore a great object for Verres to get the trial postponed to the next year, when his great senatorial friends would fill the most important offices in the state. To baffle this design, Cicero contented himself with a brief statement of his case, and at once proceeded to call witnesses. So overpowering was the evidence that Hortensius threw up his brief, and Verres sought impunity in a voluntary exile. To show what he could have done, Cicero published the five great pleadings in which he intended to have set forth the crimes of Verres; and they remain to us as a notable picture of the misery which it was in the power of a Roman proconsul to inflict.
Roman General
(From Trajan’s Column)
Soon after the trial came to this abrupt issue, the law was passed, seemingly with little opposition; and thus a second great breach was made in the Sullan constitution.
The corrupt state of the senate itself was made manifest by a step now taken by Catulus and his friends. They restored the censorial office, which had been suspended for sixteen years. The censors of the year 70 B.C. discharged their duties with severe integrity, and sixty-four senators were degraded. For Catulus they revived the high rank of princeps, and he was the last independent senator who held that rank. When it was next called into existence, it served to give a title to the despotic authority of Augustus. The review of the knights was made remarkable by the fact that the consul Pompey appeared in the procession, leading his horse through the Forum, and submitting himself to the censorial scrutiny.
The jealousy of Crassus increased with Pompey’s popularity. Both the consuls continued to maintain an armed force near the city; and, though the liberal measures of Pompey had won the Forum, yet the gold of Crassus commanded many followers. The senate dreaded that the days of Marius or Cinna might return. But Crassus calculated the risks of a conflict, and prudently resolved to give a pledge of peace. At the close of the year he publicly offered his hand to Pompey, which the latter deigned to accept after the manner of a prince. It did not suit Crassus to disturb credit and imperil his vast fortune by a civil war; Pompey was satisfied so long as no other disputed his claim to be the first citizen of the republic.
Thus ended by far the most remarkable year that had passed since the time of Sulla. Two generals, backed by an armed force, had trampled on the great dictator’s laws; and one of them had rudely shaken the political edifice reared in so much blood. Behind them appeared the form of one who sought to gain by eloquence and civil arts what had lately been arrogated by the sword. But it was some years yet before Cæsar descended into the political arena.b
POMPEY SUBDUES THE CILICIAN PIRATES
[84-67 B.C.]
During the party struggles in Italy, Sicily, Africa, and Spain, during the dictatorship of Sulla and its sanguinary effects, felt long afterwards in the Sertorian and Slave wars, the sufferings of Rome and her provinces were increased by a scourge of a peculiar character which had gradually attained alarming proportions.
The coasts of the western part of that district of Asia Minor known as Cilicia, where the wild mountains of the Taurus, which intersect the country, afford a safe refuge to the robber and his prey, had been from ancient times the home of piracy. The hopeless confusion of the Syrian kingdom, of which Cilicia formed a part, set order at defiance and for a long time allowed full play to the lucrative trade which flourished under the protection of the states of Rhodes, Cyprus, and Egypt, all of them at enmity with the Syrian monarchy.
We know how in the year 228 Rome had punished the Illyrian pirates, but it was only about the year 103 that Marcus Antonius was sent against those of Cilicia and after some time celebrated a hard-earned triumph. The torpor of the Roman government and the civil disturbances were more inimical to the safety of the seas than to that of the land; and in the war against Mithridates, in which civil disturbances played such a disastrous part, the ships of the Cilicians offered the same refuge to the vanquished—whether he were of Pontus, Greece, or Rome, whether Mithridates or Sulla had made him homeless—as they afforded to escaped convicts, runaway slaves, and the outcasts of every nation and every country. Their pirate sails were soon to be found all over the Mediterranean Sea. After the collapse of the Grecian states and the decay of the Roman sea power there was soon no safety for any merchant ship, or coast district.
When the captured men could not ransom themselves by large sums of money, they were taken to the great slave markets of which the island of Delos was the chief depot, and in the secure and unassailable mountain castles of Cilicia the corsairs deposited the money and other property which their boats and fleets had seized throughout the whole district of the Mediterranean.