uch things, for it
provided no serious check on the excesses of this capricious military
administration. Judicial control, it is true, was not entirely
wanting. Although, according to the universal but more than
questionable rule of allowing no complaint to be brought against a
commander-in-chief during his term of office,(35) the Roman governor
could ordinarily be called to account only after the mischief had
been done, yet he was amenable both to a criminal and to a civil
prosecution. In order to the institution of the former, a tribune of
the people by virtue of the judicial power pertaining to him had to
take the case in hand and bring it to the bar of the people; the civil
action was remitted by the senator who administered the corresponding
praetorship to a jury appointed, according to the constitution of the
tribunal in those times, from the ranks of the senate. In both cases,
therefore, the control lay in the hands of the ruling class, and,
although the latter was still sufficiently upright and honourable not
absolutely to set aside well-founded complaints, and the senate even
in various instances, at the call of those aggrieved, condescended
itself to order the institution of a civil process, yet the complaints
of poor men and foreigners against powerful members of the ruling
aristocracy--submitted to judges and jurymen far remote from the scene
and, if not involved in the like guilt, at least belonging to the same
order as the accused--could from the first only reckon on success in
the event of the wrong being clear and crying; and to complain in vain
was almost certain destruction. The aggrieved no doubt found a sort
of support in the hereditary relations of clientship, which the
subject cities and provinces entered into with their conquerors and
other Romans brought into close contact with them. The Spanish
governors felt that no one could with impunity maltreat clients of
Cato; and the circumstance that the representatives of the three
nations conquered by Paullus--the Spaniards, Ligurians, and
Macedonians--would not forgo the privilege of carrying his bier to the
funeral pile, was the noblest dirge in honour of that noble man. But
not only did this special protection give the Greeks opportunity to
display in Rome all their talent for abasing themselves in presence of
their masters, and to demoralize even those masters by their ready
servility--the decrees of the Syracusans in honour of Marcellus, aft