But Alexander was a single man, and he could not accomplish what was accomplished in a succession of generations by the corporate energies and virtues of the Roman Senate. The conditions under which this morality had maintained itself were now gone. It depended on the circumstances of a small community, long engaged in a struggle for existence with powerful and aggressive neighbours, the Latin, the Etruscan, the Samnite, and the Gaul; entering in turn, when its own safety had been secured, on a career of conquest, still in a certain sense defensive, since every neighbour was in those days an enemy; and continuing to task to the utmost the citizen's devotion to the State, the virtues of command and obedience necessary to victory, and the frugality necessary to supply the means of great national efforts; while luxury was kept at bay, though the means of indulging it had begun to flow in, by the check of national danger and the counter-attraction of military glory. But all this was at an end when Carthage and Macedon were overthrown. National danger and the necessity for national effort being removed, self-devotion failed, egotism broke loose, and began to revel in the pillage and oppression of a conquered world. The Roman character was corrupted, as the Spartan character was corrupted when Sparta, from being a camp in the midst of hostile Helots, became a dominant power and sent out governors to subject states; though the corruption in the case of Sparta was far more rapid, because Spartan excellence was more exclusively military, more formal and more obsolete. The mass of the Romans ceased to perform military duty, and there being no great public duty except military duty to be performed, there remained no school of public virtue. Such public virtue as there was lingered, though in a degraded form round the eagles of the standing armies, to which the duties of the citizen-soldier were now consigned; and the soldiery thus acquired not only the power but the right of electing the emperors, the best of whom, in fact, after Augustus, were generally soldiers. The ruling nation became a city rabble, the vices of which were but little tempered by the fitful intervention of the enfranchised communities of Italy. Of this rabble, political adventurers bought the consulships, which led to the government of provinces, and wrung out of the unhappy provincials the purchase money and a fortune for themselves besides. These fortunes begot colossal luxury and a general reign of vice. Violence mingling with corruption in the elections was breeding a complete anarchy in Rome. Roman religion, to which, if we believe Polybius, we must ascribe a real influence in the maintenance of morality, was at the same time undermined by the sceptical philosophy of Greece, and by contact with conflicting religions, the spectacle of which had its effect in producing the scepticism of Montaigne.