Accustomed to exercise power, some of the senators believed themselves to be above the law.  When Scipio was accused of embezzlement, he refused even to exonerate himself and said at the tribune, “Romans, it was on this day that I conquered Hannibal and the Carthaginians.  Follow me to the Capitol to render thanks to the gods and to beseech them always to provide generals like myself.”

To support their pretensions at home, the majority of the nobles required a large amount of money.  Many used their power to get it for themselves:  some sent as governors plundered the subjects of Rome; others compelled foreign or hostile kings to pay for the peace granted them, or even for letting their army be beaten.  It was in this way that Jugurtha bribed a Roman general.  Cited to Rome to answer for a murder, he escaped trial by buying up a tribune who forbade him to speak.  It was related that in leaving Rome he had said, “O city for sale, if thou only couldst find a purchaser!”

=Corruption of the Army.=—­The Roman army was composed of small proprietors who, when a war was finished, returned to the cultivation of their fields.  In becoming soldiers they remained citizens and fought only for their country.  Marius began to admit to the legions poor citizens who enrolled themselves for the purpose of making capital from their campaigns.  Soon the whole army was full of adventurers who went to war, not to perform their service, but to enrich themselves from the vanquished.  One was no longer a soldier from a sense of duty, but as a profession.

The soldiers enrolled themselves for twenty years; their time completed, they reengaged themselves at higher pay and became veterans.  These people knew neither the Senate nor the laws; their obedience was only to their general.  To attach them to himself, the general distributed to them the money taken from the vanquished.  During the war against Mithradates Sulla lodged his men with the rich inhabitants of Asia; they lived as they chose, they and their friends, receiving each sixteen drachmas a day.  These first generals, Marius and Sulla, were still Roman magistrates.  But soon rich individuals like Pompey and Crassus drew the soldiers to their pay.  In 78 at the death of Sulla there were four armies, levied entirely and commanded by simple citizens.  From that time there was no further question of the legions of Rome, there were left only the legions of Pompey or Caesar.

THE REVOLUTION

=Necessity of the Revolution.=—­The Roman people was no longer anything but an indigent and lazy multitude, the army only an aggregation of adventurers.  Neither the assembly nor the legions obeyed the Senate, for the corrupt nobles had lost all moral authority, so that there was left but one real power—­the army; there were no men of influence beside the generals, and the generals had no longer any desire to obey.  The government by the Senate, now no longer practicable, gave place to the government of the general.