distinction.  Already Gaius Duilius, the victor of Mylae (494), had gained an exceptional permission that, when he walked in the evening through the streets of the capital, he should be preceded by a torch-bearer and a piper.  Statues and monuments, very often erected at the expense of the person whom they purported to honour, became so common, that it was ironically pronounced a distinction to have none.  But such merely personal honours did not long suffice.  A custom came into vogue, by which the victor and his descendants derived a permanent surname from the victories they had won—­a custom mainly established by the victor of Zama who got himself designated as the hero of Africa, his brother as the hero of Asia, and his cousin as the hero of Spain.(48) The example set by the higher was followed by the humbler classes.  When the ruling order did not disdain to settle the funeral arrangements for different ranks and to decree to the man who had been censor a purple winding-sheet, it could not complain of the freedmen for desiring that their sons at any rate might be decorated with the much-envied purple border.  The robe, the ring, and the amulet-case distinguished not only the burgess and the burgess’s wife from the foreigner and the slave, but also the person who was free-born from one who had been a slave, the son of free-born, from the son of manumitted, parents, the son of the knight and the senator from the common burgess, the descendant of a curule house from the common senator(49)—­and this in a community where all that was good and great was the work of civil equality!

The dissension in the community was reflected in the ranks of the opposition.  Resting on the support of the farmers, the patriots raised a loud cry for reform; resting on the support of the mob in the capital, demagogism began its work.  Although the two tendencies do not admit of being wholly separated but in various respects go hand in hand, it will be necessary to consider them apart.

The Party of Reform
Cato

The party of reform emerges, as it were, personified in Marcus Porcius Cato (520-605).  Cato, the last statesman of note belonging to that earlier system which restricted its ideas to Italy and was averse to universal empire, was for that reason accounted in after times the model of a genuine Roman of the antique stamp; he may with greater justice be regarded as the representative of the opposition of the Roman middle class to the new Hellenico-cosmopolite nobility.  Brought up at the plough, he was induced to enter on a political career by the owner of a neighbouring estate, one of the few nobles who kept aloof from the tendencies of the age, Lucius Valerius Flaccus.  That upright patrician deemed the rough Sabine farmer the proper man to stem the current of the times; and he was not deceived in his estimate.  Beneath the aegis of Flaccus, and after the good old fashion serving his fellow-citizens and the commonwealth in