ending their whole time, as spectators or actors, in
playing, fiddling, dancing, and singing, does it not, my lord, strike
your imagination with the image of a sort of complex Nero? And does it
not strike you with the greater horror, when you observe, not one man
only, but a whole city, grown drunk with pride and power, running with a
rage of folly into the same mean and senseless debauchery and
extravagance? But if this people resembled Nero in their extravagance,
much more did they resemble and even exceed him in cruelty and
injustice. In the time of Pericles, one of the most celebrated times in
the history of that commonwealth, a king of Egypt sent them a donation
of corn. This they were mean enough to accept. And had the Egyptian
prince intended the ruin of this city of wicked Bedlamites, he could not
have taken a more effectual method to do it than by such an ensnaring
largess. The distribution of this bounty caused a quarrel; the majority
set on foot an inquiry into the title of the citizens; and upon a vain
pretence of illegitimacy, newly and occasionally set up, they deprived
of their share of the royal donation no less than five thousand of
their own body. They went further; they disfranchised them; and, having
once begun with an act of injustice, they could set no bounds to it. Not
content with cutting them off from the rights of citizens, they
plundered these unfortunate wretches of all their substance; and, to
crown this masterpiece of violence and tyranny, they actually sold every
man of the five thousand as slaves in the public market. Observe, my
lord, that the five thousand we here speak of were cut off from a body
of no more than nineteen thousand; for the entire number of citizens was
no greater at that time. Could the tyrant who wished the Roman people
but one neck; could the tyrant Caligula himself have done, nay, he could
scarcely wish for, a greater mischief than to have cut off, at one
stroke, a fourth of his people? Or has the cruelty of that series of
sanguine tyrants, the Caesars, ever presented such a piece of flagrant
and extensive wickedness? The whole history of this celebrated republic
is but one tissue of rashness, folly, ingratitude, injustice, tumult,
violence, and tyranny, and, indeed, of every species of wickedness that
can well be imagined. This was a city of wise men, in which a minister
could not exercise his functions; a warlike people, amongst whom a
general did not dare either to