magistrate of Puteoli strangled
because he had not collected in time his town's subscription to the
restoration of the Capitol. He had in fact done mischievously what the
Gracchi would have done beneficently; and greedy swordsmen occupied
the soil which the tribunes would have divided peaceably among
peaceable men. [Sidenote: The policy of the Gracchi justified by after
events.] The civil wars and the triumvirates are the best vindication
of the policy of the Gracchi, unless we can bring ourselves to fancy
that the Gracchi created, instead of attempting wisely to satisfy,
the demands of the age. By an orderly intermixture of Italians and
foreigners with the corrupt body of Roman citizens new life might have
been infused into the old system, and something foreshadowing modern
representative government have been established, without proscription
or praetorian rule. As it was, the vices of society only became
aggravated at an era of violence, and the sharpest remedies failed to
stay the creeping paralysis by which it was assailed.

The gradual depopulation of Italy has already been described. In spite
of Sulla's colonies the ruin of the country must have been vastly
accelerated by his civil wars and those which followed them. And,
while the honest country class was dying out, the town class was ever
plunging deeper into frivolity and voluptuousness. To defray the cost
of the sumptuous life of the capital the fashionable spendthrift was
forced to resort to extortion in the provinces, which, as we have
seen, became so crying an evil that a permanent court existed for
dealing with it before the time of Sulla. The greedy throve on usury,
or involved the State in war, to fill their own purses. The fortunes
amassed by an Aquillius, a Verres, a Lucullus, spoke as eloquently of
Rome's rapacity abroad as did those of Crassus or Sulla in Italy. Such
being the state of things under the government which Sulla strove
to perpetuate, his character as a statesman deserves as strong
reprobation as his conduct as a man. To lay down power from a sense of
duty is one thing. Cynically to shrink from responsibility is another.
The misery of the following half-century must be laid chiefly at
Sulla's door. The inevitable goal to which everything was tending was
as patent in his time as in the time of Augustus. Whatever may have
been for the interest of the Roman aristocracy, monarchy was by this
time for the interest of the Roman world.