Translation Results Requested Through Conyac Made Public

The sovran assembly retained only a formal and decorative existence, for the transactions of high policy were conducted by the rulers in secret. Contemporaries were pained and afflicted by moral and by social degradation. True merit was not the path to successand success itself was unsafe as well as dishonourable.New men emerging established claims to the consulate by brutality or by craft. The marshals might disappear, some as suddenly as they had arisen, but the practice of diplomacy engendered in its adepts the talent of survival, with arts and devices of subservience loathed by the Roman aristocracy: no honest man would care to surrender honour and independence by becoming a minister to despotism.