in a short time, and even those, who only for credit’s sake joined in what was most necessary, saw their inherited and firmly- established wealth rapidly undermined.  The canvass for the consulship, for instance, was the usual highway to ruin for houses of distinction; and nearly the same description applies to the games, the great buildings, and all those other pleasant, doubtless, but expensive pursuits.  The princely wealth of that period is only surpassed by its still more princely liabilities; Caesar owed about 692, after deducting his assets, 25,000,000 sesterces (250,000 pounds); Marcus Antonius, at the age of twenty-four 6,000,000 sesterces (60,000 pounds), fourteen years afterwards 40,000,000 (400,000 pounds); Curio owed 60,000,000 (600,000 pounds); Milo 70,000,000 (700,000 pounds).  That those extravagant habits of the Roman world of quality rested throughout on credit, is shown by the fact that the monthly interest in Rome was once suddenly raised from four to eight per cent, through the borrowing of the different competitors for the consulship.  Insolvency, instead of leading in due time to a meeting of creditors or at any rate to a liquidation which might at least place matters once more on a clear footing, was ordinarily prolonged by the debtor as much as possible; instead of selling his property and especially his landed estates, he continued to borrow and to present the semblance of riches, till the crash only became the worse and the winding-up yielded a result like that of Milo, in which the creditors obtained somewhat above four per cent of the sums for which they ranked.  Amidst this startlingly rapid transition from riches to bankruptcy and this systematic swindling, nobody of course gained so much as the cool banker, who knew how to give and refuse credit.  The relations of debtor and creditor thus returned almost to the same point at which they had stood in the worst times of the social crises of the fifth century; the nominal landowners held virtually by sufferance of their creditors; the debtors were either in servile subjection to their creditors, so that the humbler of them appeared like freedmen in the creditor’s train and those of higher rank spoke and voted even in the senate at the nod of their creditor-lord; or they were on the point of declaring war on property itself, and either of intimidating their creditors by threats or getting rid of them by conspiracy and civil war.  On these relations was based the power of Crassus; out of them arose the insurrections—­whose motto was “a clear sheet"-of Cinna(54) and still more definitely of Catilina, of Coelius, of Dolabella entirely resembling the battles between those who had and those who had not, which a century before agitated the Hellenic world.(55) That amidst so rotten an economic condition every financial or political crisis should occasion the most dreadful confusion, was to be expected from the nature of the case; we need hardly mention that the usual phenomena—­the disappearance of capital, the sudden depreciation of landed estates, innumerable bankruptcies, and an almost universal insolvency—­made their appearance now during the civil war, just as they had done during the Social and Mithradatic wars.(56)