and were so far likely
to favour the schemes of any man who assailed the capitalist class,
Roman or Italian, as a whole; but they none the less disliked Roman
supremacy, and would be easily persuaded to attribute to that
supremacy some of the hardships which it did not cause.

[Sidenote: State of the transmarine provinces.] While such fires were
slowly coming to the surface in Italy, and were soon to flame out in
the Social War, the state of the provinces out of the peninsula was
not more reassuring. The struggle with Viriathus and the Numantine war
had revealed the fact that the last place to look for high martial
honour or heroic virtue was the Roman army. If a Scipio sustained the
traditions of Roman generalship, and a Gracchus those of republican
rectitude, other commanders would have stained the military annals
of any nation. [Sidenote: Deterioration of Roman generalship.] Roman
generals had come to wage war for themselves and not for the State.
They even waged it in defiance of the State's express orders. If they
found peace in the provinces, they found means to break it, hoping to
glut their avarice by pillage or by the receipt of bribes, which it
was now quite the exception not to accept, or to win sham laurels and
cheap triumphs from some miserable raid on half-armed barbarians.
Often these carpet-knights were disgracefully beaten, though infamy in
the provinces sometimes became fame at Rome, and then they resorted
to shameful trickery repeated again and again. [Sidenote: and of the
Army.] The State and the army were worthy of the commanders. The
former engaged in perhaps the worst wars that can be waged. Hounded on
by its mercantile class, it fought not for a dream of dominion, or
to beat back encroaching barbarism, but to exterminate a commercial
rival. The latter, which it was hard to recruit on account of the
growing effeminacy of the city, it was harder still to keep under
discipline. It was followed by trains of cooks, and actors, and the
viler appendages of oriental luxury, and was learning to be satisfied
with such victories as were won by the assassination of hostile
generals, or ratified by the massacre of men who had been guaranteed
their lives. The Roman fleet was even more inefficient than the army;
and pirates roved at will over the Mediterranean, pillaging this
island, waging open war with that, and carrying off the population as
slaves. A new empire was rising in the East, as Rome permitted the