mastered. How Marius died, and Sylla reigned for three bloody, fatal
years, is outside the scope of our purpose--except in this, that
Cicero saw Sylla's proscriptions, and made his first essay into public
life hot with anger at the Dictator's tyranny.

It occurs to us as we read the history of Rome, beginning with the
early Consuls and going to the death of Caesar and of Cicero, and the
accomplished despotism of Augustus, that the Republic could not have
been saved by any efforts, and was in truth not worth the saving. We
are apt to think, judging from our own idea of liberty, that there was
so much of tyranny, so little of real freedom in the Roman form of
government, that it was not good enough to deserve our sympathies. But
it had been successful. It had made a great people, and had produced a
wide-spread civilization. Roman citizenship was to those outside the
one thing the most worthy to be obtained. That career which led the
great Romans up from the state of Quaestor to the Aedile's, Praetor's,
and Consul's chair, and thence to the rich reward of provincial
government, was held to be the highest then open to the ambition of
man. The Kings of Greece, and of the East, and of Africa were supposed
to be inferior in their very rank to a Roman Proconsul, and this
greatness was carried on with a semblance of liberty, and was
compatible with a belief in the majesty of the Roman citizen. When
Cicero began his work, Consuls, Praetors, Aediles, and Quaestors were
still chosen by the votes of the citizens. There was bribery,
no doubt, and intimidation, and a resort to those dirty arts of
canvassing with which we English have been so familiar; but in
Cicero's time the male free inhabitants of Rome did generally carry
the candidates to whom they attached themselves. The salt of their
republican theory was not as yet altogether washed out from their
practice.