excelled in the art of preparing dishes sold for four talents; and slaves remarkable for their beauty were purchased at the price of many talents.

The picture is naturally drawn, and true for all time. When a nation is in the enjoyment of peace and is growing rich, the corruption of manners inevitably follows. But the prosperity of Rome had a less stable foundation than that of modern states, in which wealth is founded on industry, and on the inventive powers by which the labour of man is made more productive. Yet even in modern states, where the opportunities of growing rich by successful enterprise and industry far exceed all the means which the Romans had at their command, society does not escape the evil which is ever mixed with that which we call good. The luxurious habits of the rich are seen and known: wealth is coveted by coarse and sensual men because it supplies the means of pleasure; and those who cannot grow rich honestly attempt to accomplish their end by extravagant speculations and by fraud. The few who by ability, self-denial, and hard labour win their way to wealth, often foolishly aspire to establish a family which shall not exist by the same virtues which the founder practised, but shall be supported in idleness by the produce of the ancestor's labour. The young are proud of the place to which a father's ability has raised them. They have done nothing to serve mankind, or even to serve themselves, and they spend in riot and intemperance that which another has earned. The mischief does not end here. Their companions, whose fathers have been less successful in gaining wealth or have had nobler objects in view, imitate the bad example. They wish to do as the rich do: they would enjoy before they have laboured; and so kicking against the law by which society exists, they bring ruin on themselves and often on others. Thus even the wealthiest and most fortunate of our modern societies consist of one set of men, who have laboured for their own good and that of their country, and of another set, who will not labour, but are mean enough to live on those who have done the work. Thus society is cursed with a number of pestilent fellows, devourers of substance, lazy, mean, and ever on the watch to get by

borrowing, by begging, or by fraud, that which others have got by labour. The evil increases till it breaks out in crime, and even threatens revolution. The evil is manifest. The remedy is a return to plainer ways of living, to a simpler life; and an inexorable resolution on the part of those, whom knaves disturb, to crush them by any severity that is necessary to clear the world of those who prey upon it.

VOL. II.

H

CHAPTER IX.

THE LEX SERVILIA OF C. SERVILIUS GLAUCIA.

THE date of this Lex cannot be accurately ascertained, because we cannot determine in what year C. Servilius Glaucia was tribune. Glaucia was praetor in the sixth consulship of Marius B.C. 100, in which year he lost his life in a riot. As the Lex Servilia of Caepio was enacted in B.c. 106 (p. 3), and the Lex Servilia of Glaucia was later, we must place it between B.C. 106 and B.c. 100. It has sometimes been assigned to B.C. 100, but in that year Glaucia was praetor, and, as Klenze remarks, it was usual up to the time of Sulla for popular measures to be enacted by the Comitia Tributa and to be proposed only by tribunes.

Glaucia is enumerated by Cicero among the "seditiosi or disturbers of the public peace. He was the greatest knave ever known, if we accept Cicero's opinion, who compares him to the Athenian Hyperbolus, a man who has a bad character in the contemporary Attic writers. Glaucia was very sharp and cunning, and witty enough to make his hearers laugh. With these qualifications he rose from the lowest condition to the praetorship, and he would have been elected consul for the next year, if there had not been two obstacles or perhaps only one. There was a law, the Lex Villia, which prevented a man from being a candidate while he held an office, but this law had been violated repeatedly in the case of C. Marius, and it might have been violated again, if the career of Glaucia had not been cut short in his praetorship. He had gained the favour of the common sort by qualities which they could appreciate, and he had secured the support

of the equestrian order by carrying a law which restored to them the judicial office and the consequent political influence of which the Equites had been deprived by the Lex Servilia of Caepio. Such a man was qualified to rise in a corrupted state, where office is conferred by the popular vote. His cunning and his jokes, his low origin and his coarseness would have floated him into power by the suffrage of his admiring fellow-citizens.

The fragments of the Lex Servilia have been put together, restored and explained by C. A. C. Klenze, Berlin, 1825. The tablet, of which the present fragments are part, contained on one side the Lex Servilia, and on the other the Lex Thoria (vol. i., p. 355). Bluhme examined the existing fragments of this bronze tablet at Naples, and Klenze those at Vienna. Both agree that the whole tablet was originally made and adapted to receive the Servilia Lex only, and that the Thoria was afterwards written on the back of the bronze. The face, on which the Servilia is cut, is smoothed and polished: the back is rough like those bronzes which are written only on one side. The letters of the Servilia are well formed and regular: those of the Thoria are very irregular, some large and others small, and the lines are generally oblique and unequal. This is not the only example of a bronze tablet written on both sides.

With the aid of Klenze's valuable restoration of the text of the Servilia and his notes we now know something of the Servilia Lex of Glaucia, and of the constitution of the courts for the trial of the offence named Repetundae (vol. i., p. 25). The first Lex on Pecuniae Repetundae was that of L. Calpurnius Piso, the next was that of M. Junius, and the third was that of C. Servilius Glaucia. In the fragments of the Servilia Lex no laws are mentioned except the Calpurnia and the Junia, and we know nothing at all about the Junia. The Servilia was followed by the law of M'Acilius Glabrio, then by the Cornelia of the Dictator L. Cornelius Sulla, and last of all by the Julia enacted in the first consulship of C. Julius Caesar B.C. 59. All these Leges dealt with a matter which was a fruitful cause of discord in the declining Roman state.

The fragments of the Servilia show that it was both a Lex on the subject of Pecuniae Repetundae and on the constitution of the court for trying those who were charged with this offence.

The first chapter of the Servilia Lex of Glaucia names all those Magistratus, greater and less, as the Romans called them, against whom legal proceedings might be commenced for taking or receiving from any Roman citizen or Socius or any Latin, or from any person belonging to a foreign nation under the protection of the Roman people or in alliance with them, any money in any one year above a certain amount, which amount cannot be determined in consequence of the imperfect state of the fragments. The Latin terms in which the offence is defined (ablatum captum coactum conciliatum aversumve) are wide enough to comprehend any kind of taking or receiving even under the name of a gift, for a thing might in form be a gift, though it was extorted by force, threats, or fraud. Gifts under a certain amount might perhaps be received under the Servilia, as we know that such gifts were allowed at a later time. This first chapter also provided that, when the amount for which proceedings had been instituted was ascertained, and such amount was not in the defendant's possession, there might be fresh proceedings for the recovery of this deficiency from any person into whose hands it was proved that any part of the amount claimed had

come.

No man who held any "magistratus" or "imperium could be proceeded against during his term of office. That there might be no mistake about the terms "magistratus or "imperium," the persons comprehended in these words were specially enumerated, from Dictator, Consul, Praetor, and so on to the military tribunes of the first four legions (chap. iii.).

The law provided for a patronus or prosecutor being appointed by the Praetor, before whom the charge had been made; but we must assume that this appointment of a prosecutor only applied to those who could neither prosecute themselves nor appoint others as their advocates; and the