war, for example, where no individual of the ruling
lords conspicuously failed, and Lucullus, in a military
point of view at least, behaved with ability and even
glory, it was all the more clear that the blame of
failure lay in the system and in the government as
such—primarily, so far as that war was
concerned, in the remissness with which Cappadocia
and Syria were at first abandoned, and in the awkward
position of the able general with reference to a governing
college incapable of any energetic resolution.
In maritime police likewise the true idea which the
senate had taken up as to a general hunting out of
the pirates was first spoilt by it in the execution
and then totally dropped, in order to revert to the
old foolish system of sending legions against the
coursers of the sea. The expeditions of Servilius
and Marcius to Cilicia, and of Metellus to Crete,
were undertaken on this system; and in accordance with
it Triarius had the island of Delos surrounded by
a wall for protection against the pirates. Such
attempts to secure the dominion of the seas remind
us of that Persian great-king, who ordered the sea
to be scourged with rods to make it subject to him.
Doubtless therefore the nation had good reason for
laying the blame of its failure primarily on the government
of the restoration. A similar misrule had indeed
always come along with the re-establishment of the
oligarchy, after the fall of the Gracchi as after that
of Marius and Saturninus; yet never before had it shown
such violence and at the same time such laxity, never
had it previously emerged so corrupt and pernicious.
But, when a government cannot govern, it ceases to
be legitimate, and whoever has the power has also
the right to overthrow it. It is, no doubt, unhappily
true that an incapable and flagitious government may
for a long period trample under foot the welfare and
honour of the land, before the men are found who are
able and willing to wield against that government
the formidable weapons of its own forging, and to evoke
out of the moral revolt of the good and the distress
of the many the revolution which is in such a case
legitimate. But if the game attempted with the
fortunes of nations may be a merry one and may be played
perhaps for a long time without molestation, it is
a treacherous game, which in its own time entraps
the players; and no one then blames the axe, if it
is laid to the root of the tree that bears such fruits.
For the Roman oligarchy this time had now come.
The Pontic-Armenian war and the affair of the pirates
became the proximate causes of the overthrow of the
Sullan constitution and of the establishment of a
revolutionary military dictatorship.
CHAPTER III
The Fall of the Oligarchy and the Rule of Pompeius
Continued Subsistence of the Sullan Constitution