received like a god with libations of wine and odours of incense,
and at table had his head crowned by descending Victories amidst
theatrical thunder with the golden laurel of the conqueror--
are no better attested than most historical anecdotes; but even
such gossip reflects the degenerate ambition of the generations
of Epigoni. Even the better men were content when they had gained
not power and influence, but the consulship and a triumph
and a place of honour in the senate; and at the very time
when with right ambition they would have just begun to be truly useful
to their country and their party, they retired from the political stage
to be lost in princely luxury. Men like Metellus and Lucius Lucullus
were, even as generals, not more attentive to the enlargement
of the Roman dominion by fresh conquests of kings and peoples than
to the enlargement of the endless game, poultry, and dessert lists
of Roman gastronomy by new delicacies from Africa and Asia Minor,
and they wasted the best part of their lives in more or less ingenious
idleness. The traditional aptitude and the individual self-denial,
on which all oligarchic government is based, were lost
in the decayed and artificially restored Roman aristocracy of this age;
in its judgment universally the spirit of clique was accounted
as patriotism, vanity as ambition, and narrow-mindedness as consistency.
Had the Sullan constitution passed into the guardianship of men
such as have sat in the Roman College of Cardinals or the Venetian
Council of Ten, we cannot tell whether the opposition would have been able
to shake it so soon; with such defenders every attack involved,
at all events, a serious peril.

Pompeius

Of the men, who were neither unconditional adherents nor open