11.15. 15. In what Manner Rome, in the flourishing State of that Republic,
suddenly lost its Liberty.
In the heat of the contests between the
patricians and the plebeians, the latter insisted upon having fixed
laws, to the end that the public judgments should no longer be the
effect of capricious will or arbitrary power. The senate, after a great
deal of resistance, acquiesced; and decemvirs were nominated to compose
those laws. It was thought proper to grant them an extraordinary power,
because they were to give laws to parties whose views and interest it
was almost impossible to unite. The nomination of all magistrates was
suspended; and the decemvirs were chosen in the comitia sole
administrators of the republic. Thus they found themselves invested with
the consular and the tribunition power. By one they had the privilege of
assembling the senate, by the other that of convening the people; but
they assembled neither senate nor people. Ten men only of the republic
had the whole legislative, the whole executive, and the whole judiciary
power. Rome saw herself enslaved by as cruel a tyranny as that of
Tarquin. When Tarquin trampled on the liberty of that city, she was
seized with indignation at the power he had usurped; when the decemvirs
exercised every act of oppression, she was astonished at the
extraordinary power she had granted.
What a strange system of tyranny — a tyranny carried on by men who
had obtained the political and military power, merely from their
knowledge in civil affairs, and who at that very juncture stood in need
of the courage of those citizens to protect them abroad who so tamely
submitted to domestic oppression!
The spectacle of Virginia's death, whom her father immolated to
chastity and liberty, put an end to the power of the decemvirs. Every
man became free, because every man had been injured; each showed himself
a citizen because each had a tie of the parent. The senate and the
people resumed a liberty which had been committed to ridiculous tyrants.
No people were so easily moved by public spectacles as the Romans.
That of the empurpled body of Lucretia put an end to the regal
government. The debtor who appeared in the forum covered with wounds
caused an alteration in the republic. The decemvirs owed their expulsion
to the tragedy of Virginia. To condemn Manlius, it was necessary to keep
the people from seeing the Capitol. Csar's bloody garment flung Rome
again into slavery.
