and short-sighted selfishness. They were content with governing from
one day to another, and merely transacting the current business as
exigency required. They were stern masters towards the weak. When
the city of Mylasa in Caria sent to Publius Crassus, consul in 623,
a beam for the construction of a battering-ram different from what
he had asked, the chief magistrate of the town was scourged for it;
and Crassus was not a bad man, and a strictly upright magistrate.
On the other hand sternness was wanting in those cases where it would
have been in place, as in dealing with the barbarians on the frontiers
and with the pirates. When the central government renounced all
superintendence and all oversight of provincial affairs, it entirely
abandoned not only the interests of the subjects, but also those of
the state, to the governor of the day. The events which occurred in
Spain, unimportant in themselves, are instructive in this respect.
In that country, where the government was less able than in other
provinces to confine itself to the part of a mere onlooker, the law
of nations was directly trampled under foot by the Roman governors;
and the honour of Rome was permanently dragged in the mire by a
faithlessness and treachery without parallel, by the most wanton
trifling with capitulations and treaties, by massacring people who
had submitted and instigating the assassination of the generals of
the enemy. Nor was this all; war was even waged and peace concluded
against the expressed will of the supreme authority in Rome, and
unimportant incidents, such as the disobedience of the Numantines,
were developed by a rare combination of perversity and folly into
a crisis of fatal moment for the state. And all this took place
without any effort to visit it with even a serious penalty in Rome.
Not only did the sympathies and rivalries of the different coteries
in the senate contribute to decide the filling up of the most
important places and the treatment of the most momentous political