uate. An
effort was made to emancipate the Comitia from the prepondering influence
of the aristocracy. The senators were compelled to renounce their public
horse on admission to the Senate, and also the privilege of voting in the
eighteen equestrian centimes. But there was the semblance of increased
democratic power rather than the reality. All the great questions of the
day turned upon the election of the curule magistracies, and there was
sufficient influence among the nobles to secure these offices. Young men
from noble families crowded into the political arena, and claimed what
once was the reward of distinguished merit. Powerful connections were
indispensable for the enjoyment of political power, as in England at the
time of Burke. A large body of clients waited on their patron early every
morning, and the candidates for office used all those arts which are
customary when votes were to be bought. The government no longer disposed
of the property of burgesses for the public good, nor favored the idea
among them that they were exempted from taxes. Political corruption
reached through all grades and classes. Capitalists absorbed the small
farms, and great fortunes were the scandal of the times. Capital was more
valued than labor. Italian farms depreciated from the conversion of
tillage into pasture lands and parks, as in England in the present day.
Slavery inordinately increased from the captives taken in war. Western
Asia furnished the greatest number of this miserable population, and
Cretan and Cilician slave-hunters were found on all the coasts of Syria
and Greece. Delos was the great slave-market of the world, where the
slave-dealers of Asia Minor disposed of their wares to Italian
speculators. In one day as many as ten thousand slaves were disembarked
and sold. Farms, and trades, and mines were alike carried on by these
slaves from Asia, and their sufferings and hardships were vastly greater
than ever endured by negroes on the South Carolinian and Cuban
plantations. But they were of a different race--men who had seen better
days, and accustomed to civilization--and hence they often rose upon their
masters. Servile wars were of common occurrence, Sicily at one time had
seventy thousand slaves in arms, and when consular armies were sent to
suppress the revolt, the most outrageous cruelties were inflicted. Twenty
thousand men, at one time, were crucified in Sicily by Publius Rupilius.

(M940) At this crisis, when dis