XIV. Shortly after this, however, Marcius stood for the consulship, and
then the people relented and felt ashamed to affront such a man, first
in arms as in place, and the author of so many benefits to the State. It
was the custom at Rome for those who were candidates for any office to
address and ingratiate themselves with the people, going about the Forum
in a toga without any tunic underneath it, either in order to show their
humility by such a dress, or else in order to display the wounds which
they had received, in token of their valour. At that early period there
could be no suspicion of bribery, and it was not for that reason that
the citizens wished their candidates to come down among them ungirt and
without a tunic. It was not till long afterwards that votes were bought
and sold, and that a candidature became an affair of money. This habit
of receiving bribes, when once introduced, spread to the courts of
justice and to the armies of the commonwealth, and finally brought the
city under the despotic rule of the emperors, as the power of arms was
not equal to that of money. For it was well said that he who first
introduced the habit of feasting and bribing voters ruined the
constitution. This plague crept secretly and silently into Rome, and was
for a long time undiscovered. We cannot tell who was the first to bribe
the people or the courts of law at Rome. At Athens it is said that the
first man who gave money to the judges for his acquittal was Anytus the
son of Anthemion, when he was tried for treachery at Pylos towards the
end of the Peloponnesian War, a period when men of uncorrupted
simplicity and virtue were still to be found in the Forum at Rome.
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