For seven hundred
years the Roman Republic might be styled a republic militant: for about
one century further it was an empire triumphant; and now, long retrograde,
it had reached that point at which again, but in a different sense, it
might be styled an empire militant. Originally it had militated for glory
and power; now its militancy was for mere existence. War was again the
trade of Rome, as it had been once before: but in that earlier period war
had been its highest glory now it was its dire necessity.
Under this analysis of the Roman condition, need we wonder, with the crowd
of unreflecting historians, that the senate, at the era of Aurelian's
death, should dispute amongst each other--not, as once, for the possession
of the sacred purple, but for the luxury and safety of declining it? The
sad pre-eminence was finally imposed upon Tacitus, a senator who traced
his descent from the historian of that name, who had reached an age of
seventy--five years, and who possessed a fortune of three millions
sterling. Vainly did the agitated old senator open his lips to decline the
perilous honor; five hundred voices insisted upon the necessity of his
compliance; and thus, as a foreign writer observes, was the descendant of
him, whose glory it had been to signalize himself as the hater of
despotism, under the absolute necessity of becoming, in his own person, a
despot.
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