preoccupied Roman writers to a remarkable degree, and the surviving Latin
treatises and histories exhibit a startling unanimity concerning its answer. First,
as we have seen, Roman writers were convinced that liberty created the space
for virtue—a disinterested commitment to the public good, together with the
will and agency necessary to act on behalf of that commitment. Virtue, in turn,
carried with it a reverence for justice, canonically deWned in theDigestof
Roman law as ‘‘the constant and perpetual aim of giving each person that
which is his [ius suum]’’ (Mommsen and Kruger 1985 , vol. 1 , 2 ). This account of
justice placed extraordinary emphasis on the preservation of private property,
not only for its own sake, but in order to secureconcordia, the internal harmony
of therespublica. Turning once again to theDe oYciis, we read that usurpations
of private property ‘‘undermine the foundations of the commonwealth...
they destroy harmony [concordia], which cannot exist when money is taken
away from one party and bestowed upon another’’ (Cicero 1913 , 255 ). And once
we realize, in Sallust’s words, that ‘‘harmony makes small states great, while
discord undermines the mightiest empires’’ (Sallust 1921 , 149 ), theWnal link in
the chain of values connectinglibertastogloriacomes into view.
This theory of the Roman state, with its impassioned insistence on the
sanctity of private property and its terror of civil strife, represents an over-
whelmingly patrician inheritance (Long 1995 , 216 ). Almost all of the surviving
Roman authors adopt the point of view characteristic of the small group of
families who controlled the republican oligarchy before the tumults of the
Triumviral period—the so-called ‘‘optimate’’ party, as opposed to the ‘‘popu-
lar’’ party sympathetic to the plebs. This realization, in turn, helps make sense of
the particular manner in which many of the surviving Roman authors account
for the decay and collapse of the republic. All of our sources—including Sallust,
who had strong plebeian sympathies—agree that, in several important respects,
Rome’s imperial success contained within itself the seeds of decline. To begin
with, conquest brought riches and luxury from the East, corroding the martial
character of Roman life. As the poet Lucan has it in hisPharsalia, ‘‘When Rome
had conquered the world and Fortune showered excess of wealth upon her,
virtue was dethroned by prosperity, and the spoil taken from the enemy lured
men to extravagance’’ (Lucan 1928 , 15 ). Furthermore, military commanders in
far-Xung lands retained control of their legions for too long, cultivating a
personal following and exercising private patronage at the expense of the
common good. Sallust alludes to this problem explicitly when he writes in
theBellum Iugurthinumthat, after the destruction of Carthage, ‘‘aVairs at
home and in theWeld were managed according to the will of a few men, in
republican visions 195