historical and political thought in the seventeenth - RePub - Erasmus ...

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Chapter 7. The mistress of life
for power and avarice, they corrupted Rome’s old virtues. ‘Hence it was the
desire for money first of all, and then for empire, which grew; and those factors
were the kindling (so to speak) of every wickedness.’ 173 These two factors
led to factions, power struggles, civil wars, and, in the end, the fall of the
Republic itself. 174
Alongside this process (and, depending on the author, interacting with it)
was the conflict between the patricians and the people over control of the public
land. Rome’s Italian conquests had won her many lands. These, however,
were unequally distributed: most of them were in the hands of the patricians,
who, for fear of losing land, money, and power if public land would be redistributed
among the masses, viciously opposed any land reform. This led them
into conflict with the people, who, impoverished and ‘oppressed by penury,
taxes and military service’, demanded their fair share of the public land. 175
This conflict over the distribution of public land became fiercer at the
moment that power-hungry generals, in their search for ever more power,
started to promise land to their soldiers. New factions emerged, cutting
through all segments of society, allying patricians with plebeians and the
legions, which became the private armies of their generals. These generals
saw to the destruction of the state.
Both theories, the one with its emphasis on moral decline due to wealth, the
other with its emphasis on the problem of public land and its distribution, or
any combination of the two, were known and very much alive in the seventeenth
century. 176 Heinsius, for example, Boxhorn’s own teacher and patron
173 Sallust, Catiline’s War, X.3, p. 8.
174 Cicero saw ‘the unbridled pursuit of riches’ as the cause of moral decline in his time. Wood,
Cicero’s Social and Political Thought, p. 112.
175 Appian, The Civil Wars. Translated by John Carter (Penguin Books; London, 1996), I.7, p. 5.
176 The thesis of moral decline comes back in the works of the English politician Algernon Sidney
(1623-1683). ‘… valour had conquered their foreign enemies. Rival Carthage lay ignobly hid in its own
ruin. The proudest kings had died under the weight of their chains … Many of the most powerful and
warlike towns were buried in ashes. This success followed with a prodigious affluence of riches, introduced
ambition and avarice, raising some citizens above the power of the law. Then did that victorious
people turn its conquering hand into its own bowels, and fell by its own sword. That unequalled commonwealth
which had sat like a queen ruling the nations, fell under the feet of one of her wicked sons.’
Algernon Sidney, Court Maxims. Edited by Hans Blom, E.O.G. Haitsma Mulier and R. Janse (Cambridge
University Press; Cambridge, 1996), pp. 136-37. Quoted from Jonathan Scott, Commonwealth Principles:
Republican Writing of the English Revolution (Cambridge University Press; Cambridge, 2004), p. 322. The
English philosopher James Harrington (1611-1677) believed that while Rome neglected its ‘equal agrarian’,
it ‘allowed the profits of conquest to be appropriated by nobles’. Blair Worden, “English Republicanism”,
in Burns (ed.), The Cambridge History of Political Thought, p. 467. John Pocock states that it was commonplace
among civic humanists in the seventeenth century that in the Roman Republic ‘the distribution
of lands fell under the control of soldier-politicians, so that armies became the clients and factions of their
generals, who alone could reward them, until the most successful imperator emerged to rule Rome with
his now mercenary army’. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, p. 211. In his recent work on Edward Gibbon,
John Pocock has shown how strongly influenced both Lipsius and Harrington were by what he calls
the ‘Gracchan explanation’ that was transmitted by the work of Appian. J.G.A. Pocock, Barbarism and