suffrage free, as it could not be when employers or patrons could
dictate to their dependents and make them suffer for failure to vote in
favor of their own candidates or measures. The aristocratic party
opposed the ballot as fatal to their controlling influence, which many
sincere patriots, like Cicero, regarded as essential to the public
safety, while patrician demagogues, intriguers, and office-seekers made
it subservient to their own selfish or partisan interests.] I seem
already to see the people utterly alienated from the Senate, and the
most important affairs determined by the will of the multitude; for more
persons will learn how these things are brought about than how they may
be resisted. To what purpose am I saying this? Because no one makes such
attempts without associates. It is therefore to be enjoined on good men
that they must not think themselves so bound that they cannot renounce
their friends when they are guilty of crimes against the State. But
punishment must be inflicted on all who are implicated in such guilt,--
on those who follow, no less than on those who lead. Who in Greece was
more renowned than Themistocles? Who had greater influence than he had?
When as commander in the Persian war he had freed Greece from bondage,
and for envy of his fame was driven into exile, he did not bear as he
ought the ill treatment of his ungrateful country. He did what
Coriolanus had done with us twenty years before. Neither of these men
found any helper against his country; [Footnote: No one of his own
fellow-countrymen.] they therefore both committed suicide. [Footnote: If
the story of Coriolanus be not a myth, as Niebuhr supposes it to be, his
suicide forms no part of the story as Livy tells it. The suicide of
Themistocles is related as a supposition, not as an established fact. If
he died of poison, as was said, it may have been administered by a rival
in the favor of Artaxerxes.] Association with depraved men for such an
end is not, then, to be shielded by the plea of friendship, but rather
to be avenged by punishment of the utmost severity, so that no one may