elations was based
the power of Crassus; out of them arose the insurrections--whose motto
was "a clear sheet"-of Cinna(54) and still more definitely of Catilina,
of Coelius, of Dolabella entirely resembling the battles between those
who had and those who had not, which a century before agitated
the Hellenic world.(55) That amidst so rotten an economic condition
every financial or political crisis should occasion the most dreadful
confusion, was to be expected from the nature of the case; we need
hardly mention that the usual phenomena--the disappearance of capital,
the sudden depreciation of landed estates, innumerable bankruptcies,
and an almost universal insolvency--made their appearance now
during the civil war, just as they had done during the Social
and Mithradatic wars.(56)

Immortality

Under such circumstances, as a matter of course, morality
and family life were treated as antiquated things among all ranks
of society. To be poor was not merely the sorest disgrace
and the worst crime, but the only disgrace and the only crime:
for money the statesman sold the state, and the burgess sold his freedom;
the post of the officer and the vote of the juryman were to be had
for money; for money the lady of quality surrendered her person
as well as the common courtesan; falsifying of documents and perjuries
had become so common that in a popular poet of this age an oath
is called "the plaster for debts." Men had forgotten what honesty was;
a person who refused a bribe was regarded not as an upright man,
but as a personal foe. The criminal statistics of all times
and countries will hardly furnish a parallel to the dreadful picture
of crimes--so varied, so horrible, and so unnatural--which the trial
of Aulus Cluentius unrolls before us in the bosom of one of the most
respected families of an Italian country town.

Friendship

But while at the bottom of the national life the slime was thus
constantly accumulating more and more deleteriously and deeply,
so much the more smooth and glittering was the surface,
overlaid with the varnish of polished manners and universal friendship.
All the world interchanged visits; so that in the houses of quality
it was necessary to admit the persons presenting themselves every morning
for the levee in a certain order fixed by the master or occasionally
by the attendant in waiting, and to give audience only
to the more notable one by one, while the rest were more summarily admitted
pa