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Rh ards, and Africans: upstart foreigners and enfranchised bondmen, it was said, sat beside men whose forefathers had expelled the Tarquins, and humbled the pride of the Marsian and the Samnite; two-thirds of the conscript fathers might have been puzzled, if asked to produce their pedigree. It was the policy of the last and noblest of dictators to extend the privileges of Roman citizens to the provincials, and to recruit the senate with the best subjects of the empire. But this wise as well as generous scheme was an abomination to the historian.

A very slight acquaintance with the annals of Rome in the last century of the commonwealth is sufficient to dispel the illusion that, as a city, having merely municipal laws and functions, she was great; but as the head of an empire reaching from the Euphrates to the Atlantic, from the Grampian mountains to the first cataract of the Nile, mean and inglorious. As for the city, in the good days envied and extolled by the historian, we have Cicero's authority for describing it as a theatre in which "domestic fury and fierce civil strife" were almost annually the performances; and as for the provinces, until they found Cæsars for their protectors, they were the unvarying scene of the most cruel and covetous tyranny that, if we except Asiatic despotisms, ever afflicted the human race. Even the poet Lucan, whose 'Pharsalia' is really an indictment of Cæsar and the Marian party, does not disguise the licentiousness of the era which he and Tacitus profess to lament.

Even from translations English readers may derive very fair conceptions of the Satires of Juvenal and the writings of Tacitus—at all events, so far as to perceive that the poet confirms many opinions on men and manners held by the historian. Living in the same