Rome -- History -- Tiberius, 14-37; Tiberius, Emperor of Rome 42 B.C.-37 A.D.
There is this essential difference between the suicide of Cato and the
subsequent suicide of Brutus: the former was a legitimist, to whom the
defeat of his cause meant the destruction of all that was holy, the
final collapse of law and order and religion; the latter, if an honest
man at all, was a fanatical doctrinaire who had been disappointed in
his expectation of regenerating society; Cato died because he could not
live under the new conditions, Brutus partly because he was disgusted
with his failure, partly because he preferred death by his own hand to
death at the hands of the ruffians of Antonius.
The conservative Senator objected to a King, it is true, but he
objected no less and perhaps even more to such a reconstitution of the
Senate as commended itself to Cicero and other reformers, who wished to
remodel the political arrangements of Rome in terms of the Athenian
Constitution or of some less extravagant ideal republic than that
imagined by Plato.
While the Senate contained a party of irreconcilables whom we may
call the Legitimists, it also contained a party who believed in the
possibility of a genuine reform, and adaptation of the Senatorial
constitution to the needs of the Empire; there was a liberal tradition
as well as a conservative tradition inside the Senate; the men who
had gradually broken down the barriers between Patrician and Plebeian
in the early days of the Republic, and who had gone some distance in
admitting the allies to a place in the constitution, had been succeeded
by the men who had recognized the claims of the Equestrian order, and
saw that some equitable distribution of the rewards of victory among
the rank and file of the army was necessary to the well being of the
State. The names of the men who took the lead in forcing reforms upon
the Senate are Senatorial names, Glaucia, Fimbria, Saturninus, Livius
Drusus, Cinna, no less than the Gracchi were Senators; and though they
were ill advised in mistaking the Roman mob for a constitutional party,
they were not demagogues in the sense that Danton was a demagogue; they
belonged to the body which they wished to reform; their methods were
injudicious, as was proved by the result, but it is not easy to see
what other methods were open to them. After Cicero had pledged himself
to the cause of the Conservative party in the Senate, he spoke of these
men and other men who had proposed and passed measures of reform in
terms of unmeasured reprobation, but we are no more bound to accept
his condemnation as historically accurate than we are at liberty to
accept the current terminology of political abuse in our own day as
indicating anything more than the malignity of the speaker. Even the
moderate reformer is stigmatized as a demagogue by those who object to
his reforms.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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