I. It was an age of the most enormous wealth existing side by side with the most abject poverty.  Around the splendid palaces wandered hundreds of mendicants, who made of their mendicity a horrible trade, and even went so far as to steal or mutilate infants in order to move compassion by their hideous maladies.  This class was increased by the exposure of children, and by that overgrown accumulation of landed property which drove the poor from their native fields.  It was increased also by the ambitious attempt of people whose means were moderate to imitate the enormous display of the numerous millionaires.  The great Roman conquests in the East, the plunder of the ancient kingdoms of Antiochus, of Attalus, of Mithridates, had caused a turbid stream of wealth to flow into the sober current of Roman life.  One reads with silent astonishment of the sums expended by wealthy Romans on their magnificence or their pleasures.  And as commerce was considered derogatory to rank and position, and was therefore pursued by men who had no character to lose, these overgrown fortunes were often acquired by wretches of the meanest stamp—­by slaves brought from over the sea, who had to conceal the holes bored in their ears;[10] or even by malefactors who had to obliterate, by artificial means, the three letters[11] which had been branded by the executioner on their foreheads.  But many of the richest men in Rome, who had not sprung from this convict origin, were fully as well deserving of the same disgraceful stigma.  Their houses were built, their coffers were replenished, from the drained resources of exhausted provincials.  Every young man of active ambition or noble birth, whose resources had been impoverished by debauchery and extravagance, had but to borrow fresh sums in order to give magnificent gladiatorial shows, and then, if he could once obtain an aedileship, and mount to the higher offices of the State, he would in time become the procurator or proconsul of a province, which he might pillage almost at his will.  Enter the house of a Felix or a Verres.  Those splendid pillars of mottled green marble were dug by the forced labour of Phrygians from the quarry of Synnada; that embossed silver, those murrhine vases, those jeweled cups, those masterpieces of antique sculpture, have all been torn from the homes or the temples of Sicily or Greece.  Countries were pilaged and nations crushed that an Apicius might dissolve pearls[12] in the wine he drank, or that Lollia Paulina might gleam in a second-best dress of emeralds and pearls which had cost 40,000,000 sesterces, or more than 32,000_l_.[13]

[Footnote 10:  This was a common ancient practice; the very words “thrall,” “thralldom,” are etymologically connected with the roots “thrill,” “trill,” “drill,” (Compare Exod. xxi. 6; Deut. xv. 17; Plut. Cic. 26; and Juv. Sat. i. 104.)]

[Footnote 11:  Fur, “thief.” (See Martial, ii. 29.)]

[Footnote 12:  “Dissolved pearls, Apicius’ diet ’gainst the epilepsy.”—­BEN JONSON.]