Money-Dealing

In order to show what dimensions money-dealing assumed by the side of this estate-husbandry unnaturally prospering over the ruin of the small farmers, how the Italian merchants vying with the Jews poured themselves into all the provinces and client-states of the empire, and how all capital ultimately flowed to Rome, it will be sufficient, after what has been already said, to point to the single fact that in the money-market of the capital the regular rate of interest at this time was six per cent, and consequently money there was cheaper by a half than it was on an average elsewhere in antiquity.

Social Disproportion

In consequence of this economic system based both in its agrarian and mercantile aspects on masses of capital and on speculation, there arose a most fearful disproportion in the distribution of wealth.  The often-used and often-abused phrase of a commonwealth composed of millionaires and beggars applies perhaps nowhere so completely as to the Rome of the last age of the republic; and nowhere perhaps has the essential maxim of the slave-state—­ that the rich man who lives by the exertions of his slaves is necessarily respectable, and the poor man who lives by the labour of his hands is necessarily vulgar—­been recognized with so terrible a precision as the undoubted principle underlying all public and private intercourse.(51) A real middle class in our sense of the term there was not, as indeed no such class can exist in any fully-developed slave-state; what appears as if it were a good middle class and is so in a certain measure, is composed of those rich men of business and landholders who are so uncultivated or so highly cultivated as to content themselves within the sphere of their activity and to keep aloof from public life.  Of the men of business—­a class, among whom the numerous freedmen and other upstarts, as a rule, were seized with the giddy fancy of playing the man of quality—­there were not very many who showed so much judgment.  A model of this sort was the Titus Pomponius Atticus frequently mentioned in the accounts of this period.  He acquired an immense fortune partly from the great estate-farming which he prosecuted in Italy and Epirus, partly from his money-transactions which ramified throughout Italy, Greece, Macedonia, and Asia Minor; but at the same time he continued to be throughout the simple man of business, did not allow himself to be seduced into soliciting office or even into monetary transactions with the state, and, equally remote from the avaricious niggardliness and from the prodigal and burdensome luxury of his time—­his table, for instance, was maintained at a daily cost of 100 sesterces (1 pound)—­ contented himself with an easy existence appropriating to itself the charms of a country and a city life, the pleasures of intercourse with the best society of Rome and Greece, and all the enjoyments of literature and art.