Characters and Events of Roman History | Page 6

of the great annexations of Oriental lands, a more intense delirium of luxury and
pleasure: the first time, after the acquisition of the kingdom of Pergamus, through a kind
of contagion communicated by the sumptuous furniture of King Attalus, which was sold
at auction and scattered among the wealthy houses of Italy to excite the still simple
desires and the yet sluggish imaginations of the Italians; the second time, after the
conquest of Pontus and of Syria, made by Lucullus and by Pompey; finally, the third time,
after the conquest of Egypt made by Augustus, when the influence of that land--the
France of the ancient world--so actively invaded Italy that no social force could longer
resist it.
In this way, partly by natural, gradual, almost imperceptible diffusion, partly by violent
crises, we see the mania for luxury and the appetite for pleasure beginning, growing,
becoming aggravated from generation to generation in all Roman society, for two
centuries, changing the mentality and morality of the people; we see the institutions and
public policy being altered; all Roman history a-making under the action of this force,
formidable and immanent in the whole nation. It breaks down all obstacles confronting
it--the forces of traditions, laws, institutions, interests of classes, opposition of parties, the
efforts of thinking men. The historical aristocracy becomes impoverished and weak;
before it rise to power the millionaires, the parvenus, the great capitalists, enriched in the
provinces. A part of the nobility, after having long despised them, sets itself to fraternise
with them, to marry their wealthy daughters, cause them to share power; seeks to prop
with their millions the pre-eminence of its own rank, menaced by the discontent, the spirit
of revolt, the growing pride, of the middle class. Meanwhile, another part of the
aristocracy, either too haughty and ambitious, or too poor, scorns this alliance, puts itself
at the head of the democratic party, foments in the middle classes the spirit of antagonism
against the nobles and the rich, leads them to the assault on the citadels of aristocratic and
democratic power. Hence the mad internal struggles that redden Rome with blood and
complicate so tragically, especially after the Gracchi, the external polity. The increasing
wants of the members of all classes, the debts that are their inevitable consequence, the
universal longing, partly unsatisfied for lack of means, for the pleasures of the subtle
Asiatic civilisations, infused into this whole history a demoniac frenzy that 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