administration, but even the commercial rivals who were disagreeable to him were cleared away by the armies of the state, and the most glorious cities of neighbouring lands were sacrificed, not to the barbarism of the lust of power, but to the far more horrible barbarism of speculation.  By the ruin of the earlier military organization, which certainly imposed heavy burdens on the burgesses, the state, which was solely dependent in the last resort on its military superiority, undermined its own support.  The fleet was allowed to go to ruin; the system of land warfare fell into the most incredible decay.  The duty of guarding the Asiatic and African frontiers was devolved on the subjects; and what could not be so devolved, such as the defence of the frontier in Italy, Macedonia, and Spain, was managed after the most wretched fashion.  The better classes began to disappear so much from the army, that it was already difficult to raise the necessary number of officers for the Spanish armies.  The daily increasing aversion to the Spanish war-service in particular, combined with the partiality shown by the magistrates in the levy, rendered it necessary in 602 to abandon the old practice of leaving the selection of the requisite number of soldiers from the men liable to serve to the free discretion of the officers, and to substitute for it the drawing lots on the part of all the men liable to service—­certainly not to the advantage of the military esprit de corps, or of the warlike efficiency of the individual divisions.  The authorities, instead of acting with vigour and sternness, extended their pitiful flattery of the people even to this field; whenever a consul in the discharge of his duty instituted rigorous levies for the Spanish service, the tribunes made use of their constitutional right to arrest him (603, 616); and it has been already observed, that Scipio’s request that he should be allowed a levy for the Numantine war was directly rejected by the senate.  Accordingly the Roman armies before Carthage or Numantia already remind one of those Syrian armies, in which the number of bakers, cooks, actors, and other non-combatants exceeded fourfold that of the so-called soldiers; already the Roman generals are little behind their Carthaginian colleagues in the art of ruining armies, and the wars in Africa as in Spain, in Macedonia as in Asia, are regularly opened with defeats; the murder of Gnaeus Octavius is now passed over in silence; the assassination of Viriathus is now a masterpiece of Roman diplomacy; the conquest of Numantia is now a great achievement.  How completely the idea of national and manly honour was already lost among the Romans, was shown with epigrammatic point by the statue of the stripped and bound Mancinus, which he himself, proud of his patriotic devotedness, caused to be erected in Rome.  Wherever we turn our eyes, we find the internal energy as well as the external power of Rome rapidly on the decline.  The ground won in gigantic struggles is not extended, norin fact even maintained, in this period of peace.  The government of the world, which it was difficult to achieve, it was still more difficult to preserve; the Roman senate had mastered the former task, but it broke down under the latter.