Caius Marcius Coriolanus

It was certainly not owing to a suspicion of the dispensing of money in bribery that the candidate for the votes of the citizens was required to present himself before them without a tunic and ungirt. For it was long after this time that the buying and selling of votes crept in and money became a feature of the elections.

But afterwards, bribery affected even courts and camps, and converted the city into a monarchy, by making armies the utter slaves of money. For it has been well said that he first breaks down the power of the people who first feasts and bribes them. But at Rome the mischief seems to have crept in stealthily and gradually, and not to have been noticed at once.

For we do not know who was the first man to bribe her people or her courts of law; whereas at Athens, Anytus, the son of Anthemion, is said to have been the first man to give money to jurors, when he was on trial for the treacherous failure to relieve Pylos,[*](A stronghold on the western coast of Messenia, in Peloponnesus. It was occupied and successfully defended by the Athenians in 425 B.C. (Thuc. iv. 2-41). In 410, the Lacedaemonians laid siege to its Messenian garrison, which surrendered after an Athenian fleet had failed to relieve it (Diodorus, xiii. 64, 5f.).) toward the close of the Peloponnesian war; a time when the pure race of the golden age still possessed the Roman forum.

So when Marcius disclosed his many scars from many contests, wherein he had been a foremost soldier for seventeen years together, the people were put out of countenance by his valour, and agreed with one another to elect him. But when the day for casting their votes came, and Marcius made a pompous entry into the forum escorted by the senate, and all the patricians about him were clearly more bent on success than ever before,