plunder to support the expense of luxury. Before, they seemed a race of heroes; they were now a gang of insatiable robbers. Formerly, when they had reduced a people to obedience, they received them as their allies; they now made the conquered nations their slaves. They fleeced the provinces, and oppressed their friends. As the great offices, which entitled the possessors to the command of armies, and the government of provinces, were disposed of by the votes of the people, no method was left unattempted to secure a majority of suffrages. The candidates for these employments, not only exhausted their own fortunes, but strained their credit to the utmost, to bribe the people with shows and donatives. To this infamous period we must fix the rise of that torrent of corruption, which so quickly deluged the Roman republick. The successful candidates set out for their government, like hungry emaciated wolves, to fatten upon the blood of the miserable provinces. Cicero makes heavy complaints of the rapine and extortion of these rapacious oppressors; and his orations against Verres, when accused by the Sicilians, give us a complete idea of the behaviour of a Roman governour in his province. The complaints of the oppressed provincials were incessant; but every governour had his friends amongst the leading men, whom he secured by a share of the plunder, and the weight of their whole interest was applied to screen the criminal. Laws indeed were made against this crime of peculation, but they were easily eluded, because the judges, who were chosen out of the body of the people, were as corrupt as the offenders, and were frequently their associates in villany. Thus corruption made its way into the very vitals of the republick. Every thing was venal, and the venality had made so rapid a progress, even in the time of Jugurtha, which was about eighty years after the defeat of Antiochus, as to occasion the severe sarcasm of that prince, recorded by Sallust, which places the corruption of the Romans in a stronger point of view, than the most laboured and pathetick description of their historians. “That Rome had carried her venality to so great a height, as to be ready to sell herself to destruction, if she could but find a purchaser.” When the Romans had beggared the monarchs, whom they vouchsafed to style their friends, and drained the provinces until they had scarce any thing left to plunder; the same principle which had induced them to pillage the universe, impelled them now to prey upon one another.[263] Marius and Sylla were the first Romans who set the fatal precedent, and were the first who bridled Rome with a standing army. The civil power was compelled to give way to the military, and from that period we may truly date the ruin of the Roman liberty. The state continued to fluctuate between despotism and anarchy, until it terminated irretrievably under the Cæsars, in the most absolute, and most infernal tyranny that any people were ever yet cursed with.