to be found, acting and reacting on each other in a perfectly happy and harmonious combination. Nor again was it, as Cicero, looking back on it a century later through the rosy medium of his own imagination, vainly pictured it to Roman jurymen, a constitution in which the duties and honours of government were open to every citizen whose capability and industry could give him a claim to them.[1] As we see it in Livy's later books, and as we see it put to the test in the history of its fall, it was neither a democracy, nor a mixed constitution, nor a government of the best men in the State, but an oligarchy — the most compact and powerful oligarchy that the world has ever yet seen. As Athens realised the most perfect form of democracy of which the City-State was capable, so did Rome realise the most perfect form of oligarchy.
The rest of this chapter must be occupied (1) with showing that this was the true character of the constitution in its actual practice, whatever may have been its apparent or legal form, and (2) with explaining how this strange result had come about. The constitution of the Roman republic is indeed an exceedingly difficult one to handle, more especially in a limited space. But it amply repays the careful student, for it brings him face to face with one of the most curious and puzzling problems of political science. How can a constitution be one
- ↑ Cicero, pro Sestio, ch. 65: "Ita magistratus annuos creaverunt, ut consilium senatus reipublicæ præponerent sempiternum, deligerentur autem in id consilium ab universo populo, aditusque in illum summum ordinem civium industriæ ac virtuti pateret."
