Romans, either when straitened by anxiety or relaxed in security._
I will therefore pause, and adduce the testimony of Sallust himself,
whose words in praise of the Romans (that "equity and virtue
prevailed among them not more by force of laws than of nature")
have given occasion to this discussion. He was referring to that
period immediately after the expulsion of the kings, in which the
city became great in an incredibly short space of time. And yet this
same writer acknowledges in the first book of his history, in the
very exordium of his work, that even at that time, when a very brief
interval had elapsed after the government had passed from kings to
consuls, the more powerful men began to act unjustly, and occasioned
the defection of the people from the patricians, and other disorders
in the city. For after Sallust had stated that the Romans enjoyed
greater harmony and a purer state of society between the second and
third Punic wars than at any other time, and that the cause of this
was not their love of good order, but their fear lest the peace
they had with Carthage might be broken (this also, as we mentioned,
Nasica contemplated when he opposed the destruction of Carthage,
for he supposed that fear would tend to repress wickedness, and to
preserve wholesome ways of living), he then goes on to say: "Yet,
after the destruction of Carthage, discord, avarice, ambition, and
the other vices which are commonly generated by prosperity, more
than ever increased." If they "increased," and that "more than
ever," then already they had appeared, and had been increasing. And
so Sallust adds this reason for what he said. "For," he says, "the
oppressive measures of the powerful, and the consequent secessions
of the plebs from the patricians, and other civil dissensions, had
existed from the first, and affairs were administered with equity
and well-tempered justice for no longer a period than the short
time after the expulsion of the kings, while the city was occupied
with the serious Tuscan war and Tarquin's vengeance." You see how,
even in that brief period after the expulsion of the kings, fear,
he acknowledges, was the cause of the interval of equity and good
order. They were afraid, in fact, of the war which Tarquin waged
against them, after he had been driven from the throne and the city,
and had allied himself with the Tuscans. But observe what he adds:
"After that, the patricians treated the people as their slaves,
ordering them to be scourged or beheaded just as the kings had done,
driving them from their holdings, and harshly tyrannizing over
those who had no property to lose. The people, overwhelmed by these
oppressive measures, and most of all by exorbitant usury, and obliged
to contribute both money and personal service to the constant wars,
at length took arms, and seceded to Mount Aventine and Mount Sacer,
and thus obtained for themselves tribunes and protective laws. But
it was only the second Punic war that put an end on both sides to
discord and strife." You see what kind of men the Romans were, even
so early as a few years after the expulsion of the kings; and it is
of these men he says, that "equity and virtue prevailed among them
not more by force of law than of nature."
Now, if these were the days in which the Roman republic shows fairest
and best, what are we to say or think of the succeeding age, when,
to use the words of the same historian, "changing little by little
from the fair and virtuous city it was, it became utterly wicked
and dissolute?" This was, as he mentions, after the destruction of
Carthage. Sallust's brief sum and sketch of this period may be read in
his own history, in which he shows how the profligate manners which
were propagated by prosperity resulted at last even in civil wars. He
says: "And from this time the primitive manners, instead of undergoing
an insensible alteration as hitherto they had done, were swept away as
by a torrent: the young men were so depraved by luxury and avarice,
that it may justly be said that no father had a son who could either
preserve his own patrimony, or keep his hands off other men's." Sallust
adds a number of particulars about the vices of Sylla, and the debased
condition of the republic in general; and other writers make similar
observations, though in much less striking language.
However, I suppose you now see, or at least any one who gives his
attention has the means of seeing, in what a sink of iniquity
that city was plunged before the advent of our heavenly King. For
these things happened not only before Christ had begun to teach,
but before He was even born of the Virgin. If, then, they dare not
impute to their gods the grievous evils of those former times, more
tolerable before the destruction of Carthage, but intolerable and
dreadful after it, although it was the gods who by their malign craft
instilled into the minds of men the conceptions from which such
dreadful vices branched out on all sides, why do they impute these
present calamities to Christ, who teaches life-giving truth, and
forbids us to worship false and deceitful gods, and who, abominating
and condemning with His divine authority those wicked and hurtful
lusts of men, gradually withdraws His own people from a world that is
corrupted by these vices, and is falling into ruins, to make of them
an eternal city, whose glory rests not on the acclamations of vanity,
but on the judgment of truth?