in the Rome of Cæsar and Cicero. As everywhere, the elections, from being nominations of class-representatives, have become the battle-ground of party candidates, an arena ready for the intervention of money, and, from Zama onwards, of ever bigger and bigger money. "The greater became the wealth which was capable of concentration in the hands of individuals, the more the fight for political power developed into a question of money."[1] It is unnecessary to say more. And yet, in a deeper sense, it would be wrong to speak of corruption. It is not a matter of degeneracy, it is the democratic ethos itself that is foredoomed of necessity to take such forms when it reaches maturity. In the reforms of the Censor Appius Claudius (310), who was beyond doubt a true Hellenist and constitutional ideologue of the type of Madame Roland's circle, there was certainly no question but that of the franchise as such, and not at all of the arts of gerrymandering — but the effect was simply to prepare the way for those arts. Not in the scheme as such, but from the first applications of it, race-quality emerged, and very rapidly it forced its way to complete dominance. And, after all, in a dictatorship of money it is hardly fair to describe the employment of money as a sign of decadence.
The career of office in Rome from the time when its course took form as a series of elections, required so large a capital that every politician was the debtor of his entire entourage. Especially was this so in the case of the ædileship, in which the incumbent had to outbid his predecessors in the magnificance of his public games, in order later to have the votes of the spectators. (Sulla failed in his first attempt on the prætorship precisely because he had not previously been ædile.) Then again, to flatter the crowd of loafers it was necessary to show oneself in the Forum daily with a brilliant following. A law forbade the maintenance of paid retainers, but the acquisition of persons in high society by lending them money, recommending them for official and commercial employments, and covering their litigation expenses, in return for their company in the Forum and their attendance at the daily levee, was more expensive still. Pompey was patronus to half the world. From the peasant of Picenum to the kings of the Orient, he represented and protected them all, and this was his political capital which he could stake against the non-interest-bearing loans of Crassus and the "gilding"[2] of every ambitious fellow by the conqueror of Gaul. Dinners were offered to the electors of whole wards,[3] or free seats for the gladiatorial shows, or even (as in the case of Milo) actual cash, delivered at home — out of respect, Cicero says, for traditional morals. Election-capital rose to American dimensions, sometimes hundreds of millions of sesterces; vast as was the stock of cash available in Rome, the elections of 54 locked up so much of it that the rate of interest rose from four to eight per cent. Cæsar
