The Comitium had become an exchange, the criminal trial a mine of gold for the jurymen.  No law is any longer obeyed save only this one, that nothing is given for nothing.  All virtues have vanished; in their stead the awakened man is saluted by impiety, perfidy, lewdness, as new denizens.  “Alas for thee, Marcus, with such a sleep and such an awakening!”—­ The sketch resembles the Catilinarian epoch, shortly after which (about 697) the old man must have written it, and there lay a truth in the bitter turn at the close; where Marcus, properly reproved for his unseasonable accusations and antiquarian reminiscences, is—­ with a mock application of a primitive Roman custom—­dragged as a useless old man to the bridge and thrown into the Tiber.  There was certainly no longer room for such men in Rome.

28.  “The innocent,” so ran a speech, “thou draggest forth, trembling in every limb, and on the high margin of the river’s bank in the dawn of the morning” [thou causest them to be slaughtered].  Several such phrases, that might be inserted without difficulty in a commonplace novel, occur.

29.  V. XII.  Poems in Prose

30.  V. XII.  Catullus

31.  V. XII.  Greek Literati in Rome

32.  That the treatise on the Gallic war was published all at once, has been long conjectured; the distinct proof that it was so, is furnished by the mention of the equalization of the Boii and the Haedui already in the first book (c. 28) whereas the Boii still occur in the seventh (c. 10) as tributary subjects of the Haedui, and evidently only obtained equal rights with their former masters on account of their conduct and that of the Haedui in the war against Vercingetorix.  On the other hand any one who attentively follows the history of the time will find in the expression as to the Milonian crisis (vii. 6) a proof that the treatise was published before the outbreak of the civil war; not because Pompeius is there praised, but because Caesar there approves the exceptional laws of 702.(p. 146) This he might and could not but do, so long as he sought to bring about a peaceful accommodation with Pompeius,( p. 175) but not after the rupture, when he reversed the condemnations that took place on the basis of those laws injurious for him.(p. 316) Accordingly the publication of this treatise has been quite rightly placed in 703.

The tendency of the work we discern most distinctly in the constant, often—­most decidedly, doubtless, in the case of the Aquitanian expedition (iii.  XI.  The Censorship A Prop of the Nobility)—­ not successful, justification of every single act of war as a defensive measure which the state of things had rendered inevitable.  That the adversaries of Caesar censured his attacks on the Celts and Germans above all as unprovoked, is well known (Sueton.  Caes. 24).

33.  V. XI.  Amnesty

34.  V. XII.  The New Roman Poetry

35.  V. XI.  Caelius and Milo