obj-d>Biertes Rapitel. 227 – 221

obj-d>Drittes Rapitel 275 – 262

obj-d>3meites Rapitel 247 – 239

obj-d>smeites Rapitel 280–275

obj-d>Drittes Rapitel. 239 – 227

obj-d>nacbtráge und Berbesserungen

obj-d>Die bellenisticben Solonien des Dstens

obj-d>Srstes Rapitel. 262 – 247

obj-d>srstesRapitel

From the time that the number and personal importance of plebeians in the senate had become great and went on increasing, and as in like manner the number of nobleminded patricians was ever extending, who were heartily tired of the vexatious conduct of their unmanageable brother-patricians, and along with the leaders of the plebeians strove joyfully onward,—there must have arisen an important and mischievous discord between the majority of the patres conscripti and the common council of the patres, the curies. It was sure to be the case, that the majority in the latter, possessing no experience gained by the management of public affairs, without any responsibility for their success, and lamenting the times, when the senate represented their claims to their ancient privileges, raised protestations on all occasions, and gave themselves up to great exasperation, especially against the sensible members of their own order, and decried them as apostates. It was necessary that such a state of things should be done away with, in which a faction, that was daily sinking in relative power and importance, disturbed the senate in its vocation as the government.

That this was not the party feeling of one order against the other, but the rational feeling of the good citizens and the friends of their country towards the contemptible disturbers of the peace, is plain even from the fact, that it was a patrician of one of the very first houses, the consul Tiberius Æmilius, who, when the conclusion of the campaign of 411 (416) afforded leisure, invested his collegue Q. Publilius Philo with the power of the dictatorship, in order to remove the evil by laws, which, if proposed by tribunes, would have taken a far more stormy course.

The fall of Rhegium had deprived the Mamertines of Messana of the only allies whom these robbers could have had. Uniting with them for the prize of the booty, they supported their expeditions in Sicily, in which they no more respected the protection of the Carthaginians than they spared the Greek towns: and the vengeance of the two states which ruled over the island, now rose against them.

It was Hiero of Syracuse, who longed to punish the outrages they had committed for many years. He had now come to the possession of the kingly dignity by a series of prudent actions, which are celebrated by the Greeks, and most of which were praiseworthy: by a regular, though unavoidable election of the people: an election, which the Syracusans never regretted during his reign of fifty years. For he was never charged with any despotic act, and under his unassuming simplicity, which surrounded itself with no splendour of royal etiquette, the Syracusans enjoyed all the advantages of liberty, which they had allowed to escape from them quickly under a republican constitution. His memory long remained sacred: under him Syracuse recovered from the misfortunes, which had prest it down for more than a century, and his government was the last period of prosperity, which a part of Sicily at least has enjoyed.

When Niebuhr with sad feelings finisht the second volume of his history of Rome, he exprest in that remarkable preface his longing for some rest to enable him to hasten to the completion of the third volume. Four months later he was called to eternal rest, and left behind him the work which immortalises his name, in the form which he there intimates, “what was comprehended within the limits of the original second volume, was already planned, the remainder down to the first Punic war only wanted a last revision.” It was not granted him to bring it to completion. There remained then for his nearest friends, to whom the last will of the deceast had confided the care of his manuscripts, only the melancholy duty of preserving this precious bequest in its purity, and of giving it to our age and posterity as the only possible compensation for the irreparable loss of the complete history of Rome. The honorable charge of undertaking the business of editor was conferred on me by those revered persons. They thought that the circumstance of my having been closely connected in love and veneration with the deceast during the last four years preceding his death, which forms the greatest happiness of my life, rendered me worthy of such great confidence. If my love and veneration for the memory of Niebuhr could justify their confidence, I might hope to possess some claim to it.