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Updated: May 4, 2025
But neither the national section of the patriots nor the section with Libyan tendencies attained the helm; on the contrary the government remained in the hands of the oligarchs friendly to Rome, who, so far as they did not altogether renounce thought of the future, clung to the single idea of saving the material welfare and the communal freedom of Carthage under Roman protection.
The letter came at a moment when Drusus was feeling the exhilaration of a soldier in battle, and the missive was depressing and maddening. What did it profit if the crowd roared its plaudits, when he piled execration on the oligarchs from the Rostra, if all his eloquence could not save Cornelia one pang?
Here is a lever to raise the question of county reform whenever an obstinate shire may venture to elect a representative in Parliament hostile to the liberal oligarchs. Let us admit, for the moment, that the Whigs ultimately succeed in subverting the ancient and hereditary power of the English gentry.
The walls were walls only in name; the city had long outgrown them, spreading through a thousand breaches. There was not a trained soldier this side of Capua, whither Pompeius had departed only the day before to take command of the Apulian legions. Cæsar was coming! Cæsar whose tribunes the oligarchs had chased from the Senate! Cæsar whom they had proclaimed a rebel and public enemy!
In a country where, before the doctrine of popular sovereignty had been broached in any part of the world by the most speculative theorists, very vigorous and practical examples of democracy had been afforded to Europe; in a country where, ages before the science of political economy had been dreamed of, lessons of free trade on the largest scale had been taught to mankind by republican traders instinctively breaking in many directions through the nets by which monarchs and oligarchs, guilds and corporations, had hampered the movements of commerce; it was natural that fashion should instinctively rebel against restraint.
An oligarchy of learning, where the educated govern the ignorant, or even an oligarchy of race where the Saxon rules the African, might be endured; but this oligarchy of sex, which makes father, brothers, husband, sons, the oligarchs over the mother and sisters, the wife and daughters of every household which ordains all men sovereigns, all women subjects, carries dissension, discord and rebellion into every home of the nation.
This, however, goes too far, because, apart from the instances of such vicissitudes among the ancients, the King of Syracuse keeping school at Corinth, or Alexander, son of Perseus, becoming a Roman scrivener, he actually saw Charles Edward, the Stuart pretender, wandering from court to court in search of succour and receiving only rebuffs; and he may well have known that after the troubles of 1738 a considerable number of the oligarchs of his native Geneva had gone into exile, rather than endure the humiliation of their party.
Yet they might, perhaps, have got over this, and after the manner of oligarchs, when they had no capable candidate, have filled the place with some sort of makeshift, if Pompeius had merely desired the command and had not demanded it at the head of an army.
In a country where, before the doctrine of popular sovereignty had been broached in any part of the world by the most speculative theorists, very vigorous and practical examples of democracy had been afforded to Europe; in a country where, ages before the science of political economy had been dreamed of, lessons of free trade on the largest scale had been taught to mankind by republican traders instinctively breaking in many directions through the nets by which monarchs and oligarchs, guilds and corporations, had hampered the movements of commerce; it was natural that fashion should instinctively rebel against restraint.
The spiteful Carthaginian oligarchs, who sent letter after letter to Rome to denounce to the national foe the hero who had overthrown them as having entered into secret communications with the powers unfriendly to Rome, were contemptible, but their information was probably correct; and, true as it was that that embassy involved a humiliating confession of the dread with which the simple shofete of Carthage inspired so powerful a people, and natural and honourable as it was that the proud conqueror of Zama should take exception in the senate to so humiliating a step, still that confession was nothing but the simple truth, and Hannibal was of a genius so extraordinary, that none but sentimental politicians in Rome could tolerate him longer at the head of the Carthaginian state.
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