Spread of Decay

So it seemed at a distance; matters wore a different aspect on a
closer view. The government of the aristocracy was in full train
to destroy its own work. Not that the sons and grandsons of the
vanquished at Cannae and of the victors at Zama had so utterly
degenerated from their fathers and grandfathers; the difference was
not so much in the men who now sat in the senate, as in the times.
Where a limited number of old families of established wealth and
hereditary political importance conducts the government, it will
display in seasons of danger an incomparable tenacity of purpose and
power of heroic self-sacrifice, just as in seasons of tranquillity
it will be shortsighted, selfish, and negligent--the germs of both
results are essentially involved in its hereditary and collegiate
character. The morbid matter had been long in existence, but it
needed the sun of prosperity to develop it. There was a profound
meaning in the question of Cato, "What was to become of Rome, when
she should no longer have any state to fear?" That point had now
been reached. Every neighbour whom she might have feared was
politically annihilated; and of the men who had been reared under
the old order of things in the severe school of the Hannibalic war,
and whose words still sounded as echoes of that mighty epoch so long
as they survived, death called one after another away, till at length
even the voice of the last of them, the veteran Cato, ceased to be heard
in the senate-house and in the Forum. A younger generation came to the
helm, and their policy was a sorry answer to that question of the old
patriot. We have already spoken of the shape which the government of
the subjects and the external policy of Rome assumed in their hands.
In internal affairs they were, if possible, still more disposed to