that an official in an important post was sure of making a fortune in a short time.  With such an idolatry of money, all trades and professions which were not favorable to its accumulation fell into disrepute, while those who administered to the pleasures of a rich man were held in honor.  Cooks, buffoons, and dancers received the consideration which artists and philosophers enjoyed at Athens in the days of Pericles.  But artists and scholars were very few indeed in the more degenerate days of the empire; nor would they have had influence.  The wit of a Petronius, the ridicule of a Martial, the bitter sarcasm of a Juvenal were lost on a people abandoned to frivolous gossip and demoralizing excesses.  The haughty scorn with which a sensual beauty, living on the smiles and purse of a fortunate glutton, would pass in her gilded chariot some of the impoverished descendants of the great Camillus might have provoked a smile, had any one been found, even a neglected poet, to give them countenance and sympathy.  But, alas! everybody worshipped at the shrine of Mammon; everybody was valued for what he had, rather than for what he was; and life was prized, not for those pleasures which are cheap and free as heaven, not for quiet tastes and rich affections and generous sympathies,—­the glorious certitudes of love, esteem, and friendship, which, “be they what they may, are yet the fountain-life of all our day,”—­but for the gratification of depraved and expensive tastes, of those short-lived enjoyments which ended with the decay of appetite and the ennui of realized expectation,—­all of the earth, earthy; making a wreck of the divine image which was made for God and heaven, preparing the way for a most fearful retribution, and producing on contemplative minds a sadness allied with despair, driving them to caves and solitudes, and making death the relief from sorrow.

The fourteenth satire of Juvenal is directed mainly to the universal passion for gain and the demoralizing vices it brings in its train, which made Rome a Vanity Fair and even a Pandemonium.

The old Greek philosophers gloried in their poverty; but poverty was the greatest reproach to a Roman.  “In exact proportion to the sum of money a man keeps in his chest,” says Juvenal, “is the credit given to his oath.  And the first question ever asked of a man is in reference to his income, rather than his character.  How many slaves does he keep; how many acres does he own; what dishes are his table spread with?—­these are the universal inquiries.  Poverty, bitter though it be, has no sharper sting than this,—­that it makes men ridiculous.  Who was ever allowed at Borne to become a son-in-law, if his estate was inferior?  What poor man’s name appears in any will?”

And with this reproach of poverty there were no means to escape from it.  Nor was there alleviation.  A man was regarded as a fool who gave anything except to the rich.  Charity and benevolence were unknown virtues.  The sick and the miserable were left to die unlamented and unknown.  Prosperity and success, no matter by what means they were purchased, secured reverence and influence.