Sublime

And there was no end to his rash promises of debt relief (one of the most despicable forms of radicalism in the eyes of the Roman landed classes) or to his bold threats to take out the leading politicians and to put the whole city to flames.

“The mission of the tyrant,” says Aristotle, “is to protect the people against the rich; he has always commenced by being a demagogue, and it is the essence of tyranny to oppose the aristocracy.”

This plebeian aristocracy soon had the qualities which ordinarily accompany wealth acquired by labor — that is to say, the feeling of personal worth, the love of tranquil liberty, and that spirit of wisdom which, though desiring improvements, fears risking too much.

Rome at this period had no police of any kind and hardly any resources for controlling violence beyond what individual powerful men could scratch together. The instruction ‘to make sure that the state should come to no harm’ could in theory have been intended to draw a line between the unauthorised actions of a Scipio Nasica and those sanctioned by

Governors and governed

The quarrel between the kings and the aristocracy assumed the character of a social struggle. The kings sided with the people, and depended for support upon the clients and the plebs. To the patrician order, so powerfully organized, they opposed the lower classes, so numerous at Rome. The aristocracy then found itself threatened by a double peril,

Another cause tends to render the efforts of a democratic government less persevering than those of an aristocracy. Not only are the lower classes less awakened than the higher orders to the good or evil chances of the future, but they are liable to suffer far more acutely from present privations. The noble exposes his life, indeed, but the chance