for the order of publicani generally, yet this particular company of Bithynia has my special good wishes.  Owing to the rank and birth of its members, this company constitutes a very important part of the state:  for it is made up of members of the other companies:  and it so happens that a very large number of its members are extremely intimate with me, and especially the man who is at present at the head of the business, P. Rupilius, its pro-magister.  Such being the case, I beg you with more than common earnestness to protect Cn.  Pupius, an employe of the company,[126] by every sort of kindness and liberality in your power, and to secure, as you easily may, that his services shall be as satisfactory as possible to the company, while at the same time securing and promoting the property and interests of the partners—­as to which I am well aware how much power a quaestor possesses.  You will be doing me in this matter a very great favour, and I can myself from personal experience pledge you my word that you will find the partners of the Bithynia company gratefully mindful of any services you can do them.”

If Cicero, the most tender-hearted of Roman public men, could urge the claims of the companies so strongly, and, as in this last letter, without any allusion to the interests of the province and its people, we may well imagine how others, less scrupulous, must have combined with the capitalists to work havoc in regions that only needed peace and mild government to recover from centuries of misery.  Such a letter is the best comment we can have on the pernicious system of raising taxes by contract—­a system which was to be modified, regulated, and eventually reduced to harmless dimensions under the benevolent and scientific government of the early Empire.

We must now turn to the other department of the activity of the men of business, that of banking and money-lending (negotiatores).

On the north or sunny side of the Forum we noticed in our walk round the city the shops of the bankers (tabernae argentariae).  The argentarii were originally, as their name suggests, only money-changers, a class of small business men that arose in response to a need felt as soon as increasing commerce and extended empire brought foreign coin in large quantities to Rome.  The Italian communities outside the Roman State issued their own coinage until they were admitted to the civitas after the Social War,—­a fact which alone is sufficient to show the need of men who made it their business to know the current value of various coins in Roman money; and as Rome became involved in the affairs of the East, there were always circulating in the city the tetradrachms of Antioch and Alexandria, the Rhodian drachmas, and the cistophori of the kings of Pergamus, afterwards coined in the province of Asia.[127] No doubt the money-changing business was a profitable one, and itself led to the formation of capital which could be used in taking