The conspiracies of Catiline and Cæsar against the liberty of their country, were but genuine effects of that corruption, which Sallust has marked out to us, as the immediate cause of the destruction of the republick. The end proposed by each of these bad men, and the means employed for that end, were the same in both. The difference in their success arose only from the difference of address and abilities in the respective leaders. The followers of Catiline, as Sallust informs us, were the most dissolute, the most profligate, and the most abandoned wretches, which could be culled out of the most populous and most corrupt city of the universe.[286] Cæsar, upon the same plan, formed his party, as we learn from Plutarch out of the most infected, and most corrupt members of the very same state.[287] The vices of the times easily furnished a supply of proper instruments. To pilfer the publick money,[288] and to plunder the provinces by violence, though state-crimes of the most heinous nature, were grown so familiar by custom, that they were looked upon as no more than mere office-perquisites. The younger people, who are ever most ripe for sedition and insurrection, were so corrupted by luxury,[289] that they might be deservedly termed, “an abandoned race, whose dissipation made it impracticable for them to keep their own private fortunes; and whose avarice would not suffer their fellow-citizens to enjoy the quiet possession of theirs.” It is not at all strange that Rome thus circumstanced should fall a victim to the corruption of her own citizens: nor that the empire of the universe, the toil and labour of ages, to which the Romans had waded through seas of blood, should be destined to feed the detestable vices of a few monsters, who were a disgrace even to human nature. The total change of the Roman constitution, the unlimited tyranny of the emperors, and the abject slavery of the people, were all effects of the same cause, extended in degree by a natural progression. The Romans in fact were no more; the name indeed subsisted, but the idea affixed to that name, was as totally changed as their ancient constitution. In the time of Pyrrhus the Roman senate appeared an assembly of kings to his ambassadour Cyneas. When the east had felt the force of the Roman arms, the most despotick princes received the orders of a Roman senate, and executed them with as prompt obedience, as a slave would do the commands of his master. A deputy from the Roman senate made a haughty monarch tremble at the head of a victorious army, compelled him to resign all his conquests, and return ingloriously home, by a single motion of his walking-stick.[290]