In all history, there are a few concrete truths, and one of them, surely, is that once corruption permeates a political system, there are only two options left: to make the punishment for corrupt practices so terrible that a cultural change will extinguish the practice, or to play the same game as your peers because by being moral, you will lose.

Unfortunately, to my knowledge, no Roman in any position of authority ever tried to 'clean up Dodge' regarding rampant corruption in every facet of government. Therefore, for those of us who had to choose either to participate in the dirty game, or stand nobly aside, those were the only choices we had.

I should point out that bribery in the pursuit of running for office had become so commonplace by the '60's and '50's BC, that even Cato was willing publicly to admit to bribery to try to stop my achieving a given office. If Cato was willing to do it, you can be sure that not one political hack in a thousand without his backbone even gave it a second thought.

Perhaps what appears so terrible in retrospect about the Triumvirs was the sheer scale of their corruption, but it was a question only of scale, and not of being on the fiddle in the first place. I personally believe that the damage to juries from extreme bribes - such as Clodius, but it started long before his example - was the beginning of the end of any kind of 'clean' government operations. After that, one simply had to be willing to pay more for support than your opponent.

I'd also argue that the rapacity of provincial governors, which became ever more extreme from about 150 BC on, set an example of sheer waste and corruption that infiltrated almost every other aspect of imperial rule. With these examples all around them from the 'best' of society, why should the people think twice about accepting bribes for any violent action against any supposed enemy?