University of Virginia Library

The Roman elections were conducted with an order and dignity that might make us look to a higher original than Italian barbarism. The Consuls, as the first officers of the state, were chosen with peculiar solemnity. The freemen of Rome were assembled in the Comitia Centuriata, in the Campus Martius, by notice given seventeen days before; and the names of the candidates were declared before the notice. The ceremony was consecrated by religious observances; the auspices were taken; and prayers said by the Consul, followed by the augur; the business then opened in an address from the Curule chair, and the classes proceeded to vote by ballot.

It was the peculiar and honourable distinction of Cicero's election, that, when the people came up with their ballots in their hands, they yet chose him by acclamation. The form of those elections assists the suppostion of a Northern origin of Rome. The magistrate was chosen like the king of a German or Scythian tribe. The people marched to the ground in military array, under military banners; and the Consul, their general in the field, was their president in the Campus Martius. The warlike spirit of this array is clear; for the reason of holding the Comitia without the walls, was the law prohibiting the assemblage of an army within the city.

The stately decorum of those proceedings puts to shame the extravagance of our modern hustings. But human nature has, probably, been always the same; and the popular suffrage was solicited in every mode that inflames the passions, or seduces the cupidity of the multitude. Our election reserves its effervescence for the hustings; the Roman election was in full, and often guilty, activity, for ten years before, the usual period from the quæstorship to the consulate. Personal influence, individual bribery, and popular largesses, of a prodigality at which modern corruption and modern fortunes shrink, were restlessly employed, and undoubtedly with fatal results to the national freedom, strength, and honour. The gladiatorial shows, the feasts of the whole population, the prodigious donatives of wine and corn, broke down the estates of the ancient nobility, who repaid themselves by extortion in their provincial governments, or bloody struggles for supremacy at home. Cæsar covered the floor of the chief theatre of Rome with silver, and reimbursed himself by destroying the republic.

One great evil of the Roman constitution seems to have been this privilege of popular election to all the eminent offices. From the quæstorship, every object of ambition depended on the suffrage of a vast and uncontrolled body, of whom the majority must be purchasable and purchased. Ambitious opulence was thus urged to the ruin of its hereditary wealth, and ambitious poverty to the still more formidable object of stirring up popular insubordination. Yet the usual expedients for repressing corruption were adopted,—office was vacated by the proof of direct bribery,—and of the four quæstiones perpetuæ, for which peculiar judges were appointed, one was De Ambitu. The prodigality of Cæsar surpased that of all his contemporaries,—and he had to contend with mighty donors: Scaurus, when Ædile, had built a theatre for 80,000 persons. Pompey had built another great theatre of stone. Curio had built two, in which he exhibited alternate shows of gladiators and dramas. But Cæsar, who, from early life, must have looked to the sovereignty, was the unequalled purchaser of the people. His Gallic plunder was flung out in every direction that could allure the avarice or the luxury of Rome, and all its offices were thus laid at his feet. In his competition for the high-priesthood, for even this was within popular suffrage, and within the universal ambition of the great soldier, Cæsar swept away the interest of two consulars of the first family and highest personal distinction. Suetonius says:—“Ita potentissimos duos competitores, multumque et ætate et dignitate antecedentes, superavit; ut plura ipse in eorum tribubus suffragia, quàm uterque in omnibus tulerit.” A power in the government to dispose of at least a portion of those offices would have been so far a bulwark against the most dangerous of all corruption—that of the people.