generals.  Of these Livy has preserved explicit accounts, and the best example is perhaps that of the booty brought by Scipio Asiaticus from Asia Minor in 189 B.C., of which Pliny remarks that it first introduced luxury into Italy.[104] It has been roughly computed that the total amount from indemnities may be taken at six million of our pounds, in the period of the great wars of the second century B.C., and from booty very much the same sum.  Besides this we have to take account of the produce of the Spanish silver mines, of which the Romans came into possession with the Carthaginian dominions in Spain; the richest of these were near Carthago Nova, and Polybius tells us that in his day they employed 40,000 miners, and produced an immense revenue.[105]

All this went into the aerarium, except what was distributed out of the booty to the soldiers, both Romans and socii, the former naturally taking as a rule double the amount paid to the latter.  But the influx of treasure into the State coffers soon began to tell upon the financial welfare of the whole citizen community; the most striking proof of this is the fact that, in 167 B.C., after the second Macedonian war, the tribulum or property-tax was no longer imposed upon all citizens.  Henceforward the Roman citizen had hardly any burdens to bear except the necessity of military service, and there are very distinct signs that he was beginning to be unwilling to bear even that one.  He saw the prominent men of his time enriching themselves abroad and leading luxurious lives, and the spirit of ease and idleness began inevitably to affect him too.  Polybius indeed, writing about 140-130 B.C., declines to state positively that the great Romans were corrupt or extortionate,[106] and those who were his intimate friends, Aemilius Paullus and his sons, were distinguished for their “abstinentia”:  but the mere occurrence of this word “abstinentia” in the epitomes of Livy’s lost books which dealt with this time, betrays the fact too obviously.  In 149 was passed the first of the long series of laws intended, but in vain, to check the tendency of provincial governors to extort money from their subjects; and as this law established for the first time a standing court to try offences of this kind, the inference is inevitable that such offences were common and on the increase.

The remarkable fact about this inpouring of wealth is its extraordinary suddenness.  Within the lifetime of a single individual, Cato the Censor, who died an old man in 149 B.C., the financial condition of the State and of individuals had undergone a complete change.  Cato loved to make money and knew very well how to do it, as his own treatise on agriculture plainly shows; but he wished to do it in a legitimate way, and to spend profitably the money he made, and he spared no pains to prevent others from making it illegally and spending it unprofitably.  He saw clearly that the sudden influx of wealth was disturbing