e natural causes co-operate to produce a
metropolitan rabble: neither the nobility nor the demagogues,
moreover, can be acquitted from the reproach of having systematically
nursed its growth, and of having undermined, so far as in them lay,
the old public spirit by flattery of the people and things still
worse. The electors as a body were still too respectable to admit of
direct electoral corruption showing itself on a great scale; but the
favour of those entitled to vote was indirectly courted by methods far
from commendable. The old obligation of the magistrates, particularly
of the aediles, to see that corn could be procured at a moderate price
and to superintend the games, began to degenerate into the state of
things which at length gave rise to the horrible cry of the city
populace under the Empire, "Bread for nothing and games for ever!"
Large supplies of grain, cither placed by the provincial governors at
the disposal of the Roman market officials, or delivered at Rome free
of cost by the provinces themselves for the purpose of procuring
favour with particular Roman magistrates, enabled the aediles, from
the middle of the sixth century, to furnish grain to the population of
the capital at very low prices. "It was no wonder," Cato considered,
"that the burgesses no longer listened to good advice--the belly
forsooth had no ears."

Festivals

Popular amusements increased to an alarming extent. For five hundred
years the community had been content with one festival in the year,
and with one circus. The first Roman demagogue by profession, Gaius
Flaminius, added a second festival and a second circus (534);(45) and
by these institutions--the tendency of which is sufficiently indicated
by the very name of the new festival, "the plebeian games"--he
probably purchased the permission to give battle at the Trasimene
lake. When the path was once opened, the evil made rapid progress.
The festival in honour of Ceres, the goddess who protected the
plebeian order,(46) must have been but little, if at all, later than
the plebeian games. On the suggestion of the Sibylline and Marcian
prophecies, moreover, a fourth festival was added in 542 in honour of
Apollo, and a fifth in 550 in honour of the "Great Mother" recently
transplanted from Phrygia to Rome. These were the severe years of
the Hannibalic war--on the first celebration of the games of Apollo
the burgesses were summoned from the circus itself to arms; the
supers