So it seemed at a distance; matters wore a different aspect on a closer view.  The government of the aristocracy was in full train to destroy its own work.  Not that the sons and grandsons of the vanquished at Cannae and of the victors at Zama had so utterly degenerated from their fathers and grandfathers; the difference was not so much in the men who now sat in the senate, as in the times.  Where a limited number of old families of established wealth and hereditary political importance conducts the government, it will display in seasons of danger an incomparable tenacity of purpose and power of heroic self-sacrifice, just as in seasons of tranquillity it will be shortsighted, selfish, and negligent—­the germs of both results are essentially involved in its hereditary and collegiate character.  The morbid matter had been long in existence, but it needed the sun of prosperity to develop it.  There was a profound meaning in the question of Cato, “What was to become of Rome, when she should no longer have any state to fear?” That point had now been reached.  Every neighbour whom she might have feared was politically annihilated; and of the men who had been reared under the old order of things in the severe school of the Hannibalic war, and whose words still sounded as echoes of that mighty epoch so long as they survived, death called one after another away, till at length even the voice of the last of them, the veteran Cato, ceased to be heard in the senate-house and in the Forum.  A younger generation came to the helm, and their policy was a sorry answer to that question of the old patriot.  We have already spoken of the shape which the government of the subjects and the external policy of Rome assumed in their hands.  In internal affairs they were, if possible, still more disposed to let the ship drive before the wind:  if we understand by internal government more than the transaction of current business, there was at this period no government in Rome at all.  The single leading thought of the governing corporation was the maintenance and, if possible, the increase of their usurped privileges.  It was not the state that had a title to get the right and best man for its supreme magistracy; but every member of the coterie had an inborn title to the highest office of the state—­a title not to be prejudiced either by the unfair rivalry of men of his own class or by the encroachments of the excluded.  Accordingly the clique proposed to itself, as its most important political aim, the restriction of re-election to the consulship and the exclusion of “new men”; and in fact it succeeded in obtaining the legal prohibition of the former about 603,(1) and in sufficing with a government of aristocratic nobodies.  Even the inaction of the government in its outward relations was doubtless connected with this policy of the nobility, exclusive towards commoners, and distrustful towards the individual members of their own order.  By no surer means could they keep commoners, whose deeds were their patent of nobility, aloof from the pure circles of the aristocracy than by giving no opportunity to any one to perform deeds at all; to the existing government of general mediocrity even an aristocratic conqueror of Syria or Egypt would have proved extremely inconvenient.