Such being the financial method of Cicero and his brother, we cannot be surprised to find that the younger generation of the family followed faithfully in the footsteps of their elders.  We have seen that the young Marcus had a large allowance at Athens and on the whole he seems to have kept fairly well within it, in spite of some trouble; but his cousin the younger Quintus, coming to see his uncle in December 45, showed him a gloomy countenance, and on being asked the meaning of it, said that he was going with Caesar to the Parthian war in order to avoid his creditors, and presumably to make money to pay them with.[145] He had not even enough money for the journey out.  His uncle did not offer to give him any, but he does not seem to have thought very seriously of the young man’s embarrassments.

One more example of the financial dealings of the business men of this extraordinary age, and we will bring this chapter to an end.  It is a story which has luckily been preserved in Cicero’s speech in defence of a certain Rabirius Postumus in the year 54, who was accused under Caesar’s law de pecuniis repetundis (extortion in the provinces).  It is a remarkable revelation of all the most striking methods of making and using money in the last years of the Republic.

The father of this Rabirius, says Cicero, had been a distinguished member of the equestrian order, and “fortissimus et maximus publicanus”; not greedy of money, but most liberal to his friends—­in other words, he was not a miser, for that character was rare in this age, but lent his money freely in order to acquire influence and consideration.  The son took up the same line of business, and engaged in a wide sphere of financial operations.  He dealt largely in the stock of the tax-companies; he lent money to cities in several provinces; he lent money to Ptolemy Auletes, King of Egypt, both before he was expelled from his kingdom by sedition, and afterwards when he was in Rome in 59 and 58, intriguing to induce the senate to have him restored.  Rabirius never doubted that he would be so restored, and seems to have failed to see the probability of such a policy being contested or quarrelled about, as actually happened in the winter of 57-56.  He lent, and persuaded his friends to lend:[146] he represented the king’s cause as a good investment; and then, like the investing agent of to-day who slips so easily from carelessness into crime, he had to go on lending more and more, because he feared that if he stopped the king might turn against him.

He had staked the mass of his substance on a desperate venture.  But time went on and Ptolemy was not restored, and without the revenues of his kingdom he of course could not pay his creditors.  At last, at the end of the year 56, Gabinius, then governor of Syria, had pressure put on him by the creditors—­among them perhaps both Caesar and Pompeius—­to march into Egypt without the authority of the senate.  He took Rabirius with him, and, in order to secure