Excerpt from Caesar's "Bellum Britannicum," De Bello Gallico, IV. 20-30, V. 8-23: With Introduction, Notes and Vocabulary There can be no doubt that the last century of the toman Republic found the free institutions under which the greatness of Rome had grown, far advanced in decadence. Each of its two factors, the patrician and the plebeian one, had wholly changed its character. The Imperial position which the conquest of Carthage and of the East brought to the Republic, made the Senate a Committee of Satraps the free plebeian yeomanry - half soldiers, half farmers - whose swords had held Pyrrhus and Hannibal at bay, were disap pearing as early as the time of the Gracchi: immense and ever-increasing landed estates were owned all through Italy by a slave-holding noblesse the religion and morality which had given to the world some of its noblest types of manhood and womanhood was a thing of the past to the generation when two minis ters of religion could not look each other in the face without a smile. As Matthew Arnold describes those days: On that high Roman heart disgust And secret loathing fell. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.