The works of Horace : with English notes, critical and ... - Cristo Raul

LIFE OF HORACE. XXIU
and shifting race, largely formed of enfranchised slaves and men of
servile descent, would be but precarious and treacherous guardians
of national song, probably in an antiquated dialect : they would keep
up the old Italic license (so indelible, it should seem, in the Italian
character) of poetic lampoon and pasquinade : any wild traditions
which heightened the fun and the revel of the Saturnalia might live
among them; they would welcome, as we have seen, the low and
farcical dramatic entertainments ; but their ears would fee unmoved,
and their hearts dead, to the old stirring legends of the feuds and
factions, the wars of neighboring tribes, and the heroic deeds of
arms of the kings or of the early republic. The well-known anec
dote of Scipio .Similianus may illustrate the un-Roman character of
this populace of Rome. When the mob raised a furious clamor at
his bold assertion of the justice of the death of Tiberius Gracchus,
" Silence, ye step-sons of Italy ! What ! shall I fear these fellows,
now they are free, whom I myself have brought in chains to Rome ?"
These were the operatives (operse) who flocked, not merely from the
workshops of Rome, but from all the adjacent districts, to swell the
turbulent rabble of Clodius.'
The territory of Rome, the demesne-lands formerly cultivated by
Roman citizens, in which resided the strength of the Roman people,
had been gradually drained of the free population. For several cen-
turies it had filled the legions, and those legions had achieved the
conquest of the world. But that conquest was not won without
enormous loss. The best blood of the Roman people had fertilized
the earth almost from the Euphrates to the Western Ocean. The
veterans who returned received apportionments of land, but more
frequently in remote parts of Italy : the actual Roman territory, there-
fore, that in which the old Roman language was the native dialect,
and in which migllt survive that Roman pride which would cherish
the poetic reminiscences of Roman glory, was now, for the most part,
either occupied by the rising villas of the patricians, or by the large
farms of the wealthy, and cultivated by slaves. The homestead
whence a CamiUus issued to rescue his country from the Gauls
may now have become a work-house, in which crouched the slaves
of some Verres, enriched with provincial plunder, or some usurious
knight ; a gang of Africans or Asiatics may have tilled the field
where Cincinnatus left his plough to assume the consular fasces. For
centuries this change had been gradually going on ; the wars, and
even the civil factions, were continually wasting away the Roman
population, while the usurpation of wealth and pride was as constant-
ly keeping up its slow aggression, and filling up the void with the
slaves which poured in vrith every conquest. The story of Spartacus
may tell how large a part of the rural population of Italy was
servile ; and probably, the nearer to Rome, in the districts formerly
inhabited by the genuine Roman people, the change (with uonw
1. Vett. Patere., a., 2 ; fa!. Jfoc., tL, 2 ; Cfc., ad Q. Frat., u., 3 ; cf. Vamm^ v., JM