Page:The History of Slavery and the Slave Trade.djvu/73

 rites of marriage, and condemned bythe laws of the empire to promiscuous indulgence. Vows of virginity were the testimony which religion bore against the enormities of the times. Spotless purity could alone put to blush the shamelessness of artificial excess. As in raging diseases, the most violent and unnatural remedies need to be applied for a season, so the transports of enthusiasm and the revolution of fanaticism sometimes appear necessary to stay the infection of a moral pestilence. Thus riot produced asceticism; and monks, and monkish eloquence, and monastic vows grew out of the general depravity of manners. The remedy was demanded, since public vice was threatening the Southern world with depopulation.

The gradual decay of the class of ingenuous freemen had ever been a conspicuous result of slavery. The corruptions of licentiousness spared neither sex of the Roman people; and the consequence was so certain, that emancipation alone could supply the void. Nor was it long before the majority of the cohorts, of the priesthood, of the tribes, of the people, nay of the senate itself, came to consist of emancipated slaves. But the sons of slaves could have no capacity for defending freedom; and despotism was at hand, when, besides the sovereign, there were few who were not bondmen or the children of bondmen. Freedom, to exist securely, must be locked fast in hereditary affections, and confirmed as a mortmain inheritance from long generations.

The government of Rome was sufficiently degraded, when the makers of an emperor, stumbling upon Claudius, the wisest fool of the times, proclaimed him the master of the Roman empire. Slavery now enjoyed its triumph, for a slave became prime minister. Io Saturnalia, shouted the cohorts, as Narcissus attempted to address them. But the consummation of evil had not arrived. The husband of Messalina had, naturally enough, taken up a prejudice against matrimony; but the governors of the weak emperor, who managed him as absolutely as Buckingham managed James I., insisted upon his marrying Agippina. He did so; and Agrippina, assisted by freedmen and slaves, disinherited his son, murdered her husband, and placed Nero on the throne. Slaves gave Nero the purple.

The accession of Nero is the epoch of the virtual establishment of the fourth revolution. The forms of ancient Rome still continued, but Nero was the incarnation of tyranny; the triumph of human depravity; the very name by which men are accustomed to express the fury of unrestrained malignity. Bad as he was, Nero was not worse than Rome. Rome had no right to complain; Rome had but her due. Nay, when he died, the rabble and the slaves crowned his statues with garlands, and scattered flowers over his grave. And why should they not? Nero never injured the rabble, never oppressed the slave. He murdered his mother, his brother, his wife. But Nero was only the tyrant of the wealthy; the terror of the successful. He rendered poverty sweet, for poverty alone was secure; he rendered slavery tolerable, for slaves alone, or slavish men, were promoted to power. In honoring his tomb, they honored their avenger. The reign of Nero was the golden reign of the populace, and the holiday of the bondman. The death of Gracchus was now avenged on the descendants of his murderers. The streams in Heaven, it is truly said, run up hill; and slavery, in producing its perfect results, had brought the heaviest curse on the heads of its supporters.

Despotism now became the government of the Roman empire. Yet, there was such a vitality in the forms of liberty, that they were still in some degree preserved. Two centuries passed away, before the last vestiges of republican simplicity disappeared; two centuries elapsed, before the Eastern diadem could be introduced with the slavish customs of the East. Up to the reign of Diocletian, a diadem had never been endured in Europe. Hardly had this emblem of servility become tolerated, when language also began to be corrupted; and, within the course of another century, the austere purity of the Greek and Roman tongues, the languages of Demosthenes and of Gracchus, became for the first time familiarized to the f orms of Oriental adulation. Your imperial