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I will therefore pause, and adduce the testimony of Sallust himself,
whose words in praise of the Romans (that "equity and virtue
prevailed among them not more by force of laws than of nature") have
given occasion to this discussion. He was referring to that period
immediately after the expulsion of the kings, in which the city became
great in an incredibly short space of time. And yet this same writer
acknowledges in the first book of his history, in the very exordium of
his work, that even at that time, when a very brief interval had
elapsed after the government had passed from kings to consuls, the more
powerful men began to act unjustly, and occasioned the defection of the
people from the patricians, and other disorders in the city. For
after Sallust had stated that the Romans enjoyed greater harmony and a
purer state of society between the second and third Punic wars than at
any other time, and that the cause of this was not their love of good
order, but their fear lest the peace they had with Carthage might be
broken (this also, as we mentioned, Nasica contemplated when he
opposed the destruction of Carthage, for he supposed that fear would
tend to repress wickedness, and to preserve wholesome ways of
living), he then goes on to say: "Yet, after the destruction of
Carthage, discord, avarice, ambition, and the other vices which are
commonly generated by prosperity, more than ever increased." If they
"increased," and that" more than ever," then already they had
appeared, and had been increasing. And so Sallust adds this reason
for what he said "For," he says, "the oppressive measures of the
powerful, and the consequent secessions of the plebs from the
patricians, and other civil dissensions, had existed from the first,
and affairs were administered with equity and well-tempered justice for
no longer a period than the short time after the expulsion of the
kings, while the city was occupied with the serious Tuscan war and
Tarquin's vengeance." You see how, even in that brief period after
the expulsion of the kings, fear, he acknowledges, was the cause of
the interval of equity and good order. They were afraid, in fact, of
the war which Tarquin waged against them, after he had been driven
from the throne and the city, and had allied himself with the
Tuscans. But observe what he adds: "After that, the patricians
treated the people as their slaves, ordering them to be scourged or
beheaded just as the kings had done, driving them from their holdings,
and harshly tyrannizing over those who had no property to lose. The
people, overwhelmed by these oppressive measures, and most of all by
exorbitant usury, and obliged to contribute both money and personal
service to the constant wars, at length took arms and seceded to Mount
Aventine and Mount Sacer, and thus obtained for themselves tribunes
and protective laws. But it was only the second Punic war that put an
end on both sides to discord and strife." You see what kind of men
the Romans were, even so early as a few years after the expulsion of
the kings; and it is of these men he says, that "equity and virtue
prevailed among them not more by force of law than of nature."
Now, if these were the days in which the Roman republic shows fairest
and best, what are we to say or think of the succeeding age, when, to
use the words of the same historian, "changing little by little from
the fair and virtuous city it was, it became utterly wicked and
dissolute?" This was, as he mentions, after the destruction of
Carthage. Sallust's brief sum and sketch of this period may be read
in his own history, in which he shows how the profligate manners which
were propagated by prosperity resulted at last even in civil wars. He
says: "And from this time the primitive manners, instead of
undergoing an insensible alteration as hitherto they had done, were
swept away as by a torrent: the young men were so depraved by luxury
and avarice, that it may justly be said that no father had a son who
could either preserve his own patrimony, or keep his hands off other
men's." Sallust adds a number of particulars about the vices of
Sylla, and the debased condition of the republic in general; and
other writers make similar observations, though in much less striking
language.
However, I suppose you now see, or at least any one who gives his
attention has the means of seeing, in what a sink of iniquity that city
was plunged before the advent of our heavenly King. For these things
happened not only before Christ had begun to teach, but before He was
even born of the Virgin. If, then, they dare not impute to their
gods the grievous evils of those former times, more tolerable before
the destruction of Carthage, but intolerable and dreadful after it,
although it was the gods who by their malign craft instilled into the
minds of men the conceptions from which such dreadful vices branched out
on all sides, why do they impute these present calamities to Christ,
who teaches life-giving truth, and forbids us to worship false and
deceitful gods, and who, abominating and condemning with His divine
authority those wicked and hurtful lusts of men, gradually withdraws
His own people from a world that is corrupted by these vices, and is
falling into ruins, to make of them an eternal city, whose glory rests
not on the acclamations of vanity, but on the judgment of truth?
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