Marius opened the bloody scene, and glutted his followers with the blood and wealth of the friends of Sylla. Sylla repaid the Marian faction in the same coin with usury. Battles were fought in the very streets; and Rome, more than once, experienced all the horrors of a city taken by storm from her own citizens. Personal resentment and revenge for injuries received, were the pretence on both sides, but plunder and confiscations seem to have been the chief motives. For the rich were equally looked upon as enemies, and equally proscribed by both factions, and they alone were safe who had nothing worth taking. If we connect the various strokes, interspersed through what we have remaining of the writings of Sallust, which he levelled at the vices of his countrymen, we shall be able to form a just idea of the manners of the Romans in the time of that historian. From the picture, thus faithfully exhibited, we must be convinced, that not only those shocking calamities, which the republick suffered during the contest between Marius and Sylla, but those subsequent, and more fatal evils, which brought on the utter extinction of the Roman liberty and constitution, were the natural effects of that foreign luxury, which first introduced venality and corruption. Though the introduction of luxury from Asia preceded the ruin of Carthage in point of time, yet, as Sallust informs us, the dread of that dangerous rival restrained the Romans within the bounds of decency and order.[264] But as soon as ever that obstacle was removed,[265] they gave a full scope to their ungoverned passions. The change in their manners was not gradual, and by little and little, as before, but rapid and instantaneous. Religion, justice, modesty, decency, all regard for divine or human laws, were swept away at once by the irresistible torrent of corruption. The nobility strained the privileges annexed to their dignity,[266] and the people their liberty, alike into the most unbounded licentiousness. Every one made the dictates of his own lawless will his only rule of action. Publick virtue, and the love of their country, which had raised the Romans to the empire of the universe, were extinct. Money,[267] which alone could enable them to gratify their darling luxury, was substituted in their place. Power, which alone could enable them to gratify their darling dominion, honours, and universal respect, were annexed to the possession of money. Contempt, and whatever was most reproachful, was the bitter portion of poverty; and to be poor, grew to be the greatest of all crimes in the estimation of the Romans. Thus wealth and poverty contributed alike to the ruin of the republick. The rich employed their wealth in the acquisition of power,[268] and their power in every kind of oppression and rapine, for the acquisition of more wealth. The poor,[269] now dissolute and desperate, were ready to engage in every seditious insurrection, which promised them the plunder of the rich, and