The  force  of  events  was,  however,  too  strong.  Polyb-
ius  himself  does  not  see  how  Roman  domination  could
have  been  avoided  ;  and  how  rapidly  honesty  and  all
other  good  principles  died  out  of  a  people  that  had  no
culture  to  depend  on  appears  very  clearly  when  we  take
account  of  the  case  of  Brutus,  "the  noblest  Roman  of
them  all,"  which  Cicero  lets  out  in  his  correspondence
from  Cilicia.  He  wanted,  through  an  agent  called  Scap-
tius,  to  extract  forty-eight  per  cent  for  a  loan  to  the  city
of  Salamis  in  Cyprus,  and  because  they  did  not  pay,
shut  up  the  senate  of  the  city  in  their  council  house,  till
one  of  them  actually  died  of  hunger  !  This  was  the  ten-
der creature  who  could  not  bear  his  companions,  the


Roman
domination

inevitable..
Greek  Culture   Under  the  Romans.  301


Roman  aristocracy,  to  lose  their  license  of  harrying  the
world,  and  so  murdered  his  benefactor,  and  the  world's
benefactor,  because  he  crushed  at  once  this  shocking  re-
publican tyranny.  This  was  the  same  Brutus  who,  in
his  campaign  against  Octavian  and  Antony,  offered  his
mercenary  army,  as  a  reward,  the  sack  of  perfectly  inno-
cent Greek  cities.  There  has  seldom  been  a  worse
criminal  than    Brutus,   and    all    the    worse   because    he  Cold-blooded

cruelty  of

assumes  before  the  world  the  air  of  an  apostle  and  Brutus.
a  martyr,  still  worse  even  because  the  creature  per-
suaded himself  of  his  own  moral  magnificence,  and
performed  his  detestable  crimes  with  the  air  of  piety  and
virtue.  These  were  the  men  who  aped  and  crushed
Greek  culture  and  Greek  letters  ;  these  were  the  men
who,  when  plundering  by  individual  magistrates  was
stopped,  fought  out  their  great  civil  war  for  supremacy
on  Greek  ground,  and  with  Greek  treasure  and  Greek
blood.
