[Footnote 13:  Pliny actually saw her thus arrayed. (Nat.  Hist. ix. 35, 36.)]

Each of these “gorgeous criminals” lived in the midst of an humble crowd of flatterers, parasites, clients, dependents, and slaves.  Among the throng that at early morning jostled each other in the marble atrium were to be found a motley and hetrogeneous set of men.  Slaves of every age and nation—­Germans, Egyptians, Gauls, Goths, Syrians, Britons, Moors, pampered and consequential freedmen, impudent confidential servants, greedy buffoons, who lived by making bad jokes at other people’s tables; Dacian gladiators, with whom fighting was a trade; philosophers, whose chief claim to reputation was the length of their beards; supple Greeklings of the Tartuffe species, ready to flatter and lie with consummate skill, and spreading their vile character like a pollution wherever they went:  and among all these a number of poor but honest clients, forced quietly to put up with a thousand forms of contumely[14] and insult, and living in discontented idleness on the sportula or daily largesse which was administered by the grudging liberality of their haughty patrons.  The stout old Roman burgher had well-nigh disappeared; the sturdy independence, the manly self-reliance of an industrial population were all but unknown.  The insolent loungers who bawled in the Forum were often mere stepsons of Italy, who had been dragged thither in chains,—­the dregs of all nations, which had flowed into Rome as into a common sewer,[15] bringing with them no heritage except the specialty of their national vices.  Their two wants were bread and the shows of the circus; so long as the sportula of their patron, the occasional donative of an emperor, and the ambition of political candidates supplied these wants, they lived in contented abasement, anxious neither for liberty nor for power.

[Footnote 14:  Few of the many sad pictures in the Satires of Juvenal are more pitiable than that of the wretched “Quirites” struggling at their patrons’ doors for the pittance which formed their daily dole.  (Sat i. 101.)]

[Footnote 15:  See Juv. Sat. iii. 62.  Scipio, on being interrupted by the mob in the Forum, exclaimed,—­“Silence, ye stepsons of Italy!  What! shall I fear these fellows now they are free, whom I myself have brought in chains to Rome?” (See Cic. De Orat. ii. 61.)]

II.  It was an age at once of atheism and superstition.  Strange to say, the two things usually go together.  Just as Philippe Egalite, Duke of Orleans, disbelieved in God, and yet tried to conjecture his fate from the inspection of coffee-grounds at the bottom of a cup,—­just as Louis XI. shrank from no perjury and no crime, and yet retained a profound reverence for a little leaden image which he carried in his cap,—­so the Romans under the Empire sneered at all the whole crowd of gods and goddesses whom their fathers had worshipped, but gave an implicit credence to sorcerers,