With the passing of the Gabinian law the parties in the capital changed positions. From the time that the elected general of the democracy held in his hand the sword, his party, or what was reckoned such, had the preponderance in the capital. The nobility doubtless still stood in compact array, and still as before there issued from the comitial machinery none but consuls who according to the expression of the democrats were already designated to the consulate in their cradles; to command the elections and break down the influence of the old families over them was beyond the power even of the regents. But unfortunately the consulate, at the very moment when they had got the length of virtually excluding the “new men” from it, began itself to grow pale before the newly-risen star of the exceptional military power. The aristocracy felt this, though they did not exactly confess it; they gave themselves up as lost. Except Quintus Catulus, who with honourable firmness persevered at his far from pleasant post as champion of a vanquished party down to his death (694), no Optimate could be named from the highest ranks of the nobility, who sustained the interests of the aristocracy with courage and steadfastness.

In presenting to my readers the fourth volume of this translation—corresponding to the third volume of Professor Mommsen's work, and embracing the period from the death of Sulla to the battle of Thapsus, beyond which Dr. Mommsen has not as yet proceeded—I have to express my regret that so long a delay has taken place in its preparation. Important duties of another kind, to which I was called after completing the third volume, rendered it necessary that I should defer for a time the further prosecution of the work, and occasioned much interruption to its progress after I had resumed it. But I considered it due to those who had so favourably received the earlier volumes of my translation that I should endeavour personally to complete it; and I can only cast myself on their indulgence if I have somewhat unduly taxed their patience.

The delay has enabled me to compare the sheets with the fourth edition of the German, issued in the present year. I have adhered substantially to the same principles of translation as in the earlier volumes, endeavouring to retain as much of the form and manner of the original as seemed compatible with a due regard to English idiom, and even venturing in some cases to have less regard to the latter than to the desirableness of reproducing Dr. Mommsen's meaning without paraphrase.

When Sulla died in the year 676, the oligarchy restored by him ruled with absolute sway over the Roman state; but, as it had been established by force, it still needed force to maintain its ground against its numerous secret and open foes. It was opposed not by any single party with objects clearly expressed and under leaders distinctly acknowledged, but by a mass of multifarious elements, ranging themselves doubtless under the general name of the popular party, but in reality opposing the Sullan organization of the commonwealth on very various grounds and with very different designs. There were the men of positive law, who neither mingled in nor understood politics, but who detested the arbitrary procedure of Sulla in dealing with the lives and property of the burgesses. Even during the regent's lifetime, when all other opposition was silent, the strict jurists were refractory; the Cornelian laws, for example, which deprived various Italian communities of the Roman franchise, were treated in judicial decisions as null and void, and in like manner the courts held that, where a burgess had been made a prisoner of war and sold into slavery during the revolution, his franchise was not forfeited. There was, further, the Aristocrats remnant of the old liberal minority in the senate, which in friendly former times had sought a compromise with the reform party and the Italians, and was now in a similar spirit inclined to modify the rigidly oligarchic constitution of Sulla by concessions to the Populares.

The Sullan constitution still stood unshaken. The assault, which Lepidus and Sertoriua had ventured to make on it, had been repulsed with little loss. The government had neglected, it is true, to finish the half-completed building in the energetic spirit of its author. It is characteristic of the government, that it neither distributed the lands which Sulla had destined for allotment but had not yet parcelled out, nor directly abandoned the claim to them, but tolerated the former owners in provisional possession without regulating their title, and indeed even allowed various still undistributed tracts of Sullan domain-land to be arbitrarily taken possession of by individuals according to the old system of occupation which was de jure and de facto set aside by the Gracchan reforms (iii. 357). Whatever in the Sullan enactments was indifferent or inconvenient for the Optimates, was without scruple ignored or cancelled; such as, the sentences by which whole communities were deprived of the state-franchise, the prohibition against conjoining the new farms, and several of the charters conferred by Sulla on particular communities—naturally, however, without giving back to the communities the sums paid for these exemptions. But though these violations of the ordinances of Sulla by the government itself contributed to shake the foundations of his structure, the Sempronian laws were and remained substantially abolished.

When Pompeius after having transacted the affairs committed to his charge, again turned his eyes towards home, found for the second time the diadem at his feet. For long the development of the Roman commonwealth had been tending towards such a catastrophe; it was evident to every unbiassed observer, and had been remarked a thousand times, that, if the rule of the aristocracy should be brought to an end, monarchy was inevitable. The senate had now been overthrown at once by the civil democratic opposition and by the military power; the only question remaining was to settle the persons, names, and forms for the new order of things; and these were already clearly enough indicated in the partly democratic, partly military elements of the revolution. The events of the last five years had set, as it were, the final seal on this impending transformation of the commonwealth. In the newly-erected Asiatic provinces, which gave regal honours to their organizer as the successor of Alexander the Great, and received even his favourite freedmen like princes, Pompeius had laid the foundations of his dominion, and found at once the treasures, the army, and the halo of glory which the future prince of the Roman state required.

When the suppression of the Cinnan revolution, which threatened the existence of the senate, rendered it possible for the restored senatorial government to devote the requisite attention to the internal and external security of the empire, various matters presented themselves, the settlement of which could not be postponed without injuring the most important interests and allowing present inconveniences to grow into future dangers. Apart from the very serious complications in Spain, it was absolutely necessary effectually to check the barbarians in Thrace and the regions of the Danube, whom Sulla on his march through Macedonia had only been able slightly to chastise (iii. 309), and to regulate, by military intervention, the disorderly state of things along the northern frontier of the Greek peninsula; thoroughly to suppress the bands of pirates infesting the seas everywhere, but especially the eastern waters; and to introduce better order into the unsettled relations of Asia Minor. The peace which Sulla had concluded in 670 with Mithra-dates, king of Pontus (iii. 308), and of which the treaty with Murena in 673 (iii. 345) was essentially a repetition, bore throughout the stamp of a provisional arrangement to meet the exigencies of the moment; and the relations of the Romans with Tigranes, king of Armenia, with whom they had de facto waged war, remained wholly untouched in this peace.

When the course of history turns from the miserable monotony of the political selfishness, which fought its battles in the senate-house and in the streets of the capital, to matters of greater importance than the question whether the first monarch of Rome should be called Gnæus, Gaius or Marcus, we may well be allowed—on the threshold of an event, the effects of which still at the present day influence the destinies of the world—to look round us for a moment, and to indicate the point of view under which the conquest of what is now France by the Romans, and their first contact with the inhabitants of Germany and of Great Britain, are to be regarded in connexion with the general history of the world.

By virtue of the law, that a people which has grown into a state absorbs its neighbours who are in political nonage, and a civilized people absorbs its neighbours who are in intellectual nonage—by virtue of this law, which is as universally valid and as much a law of nature as the law of gravity—the Italian nation (the only one in antiquity which was able to combine a superior political development and a superior civilization, though it presented the latter only in an imperfect and external manner) was entitled to reduce to subjection the Greek states of the East which were ripe for destruction, and to dispossess the peoples of lower grades of culture in the West—Libyans, Iberians, Celts, Germans—by means of its settlers; just as England with equal right has in Asia reduced to subjection a civilization of rival standing but politically impotent, and in America and Australia has marked and ennobled, and still continues to mark and ennoble, extensive barbarian countries with the impress of its nationality.

We have already seen how wretched was the state of the affairs of Rome by land and sea in the East, when at the commencement of 687 Pompeius with an almost absolute plenitude of power undertook the conduct of the war against the pirates. He began by dividing the immense field committed to him into thirteen districts and assigning to each of these districts a lieutenant, for the purpose of equipping ships and men there, of searching the coasts, and of capturing piratical vessels or chasing them into the meshes of a colleague. He himself went with the best part of the ships of war that were available—among which on this occasion also those of Rhodes were distinguished—early in the year to sea, and swept in the first place the Sicilian, African, and Sardinian waters, with a view especially to reestablish the supply of grain from these provinces to Italy. His lieutenants meanwhile addressed themselves to the clearing of the Spanish and Gallic coasts. It was on this occasion that the consul Piso attempted from Rome to prevent the levies which Marcus Pomponius the legate of Pompeius instituted by virtue of the Grabinian law in the province of Narbo—an imprudent proceeding, to check which, and at the same time to keep the just indignation of the multitude against the consul within legal bounds, Pompeius temporarily reappeared in Rome (P. 108).