to usurious speculations which at this time held chief place among the Romans.  Even Cato was a usurer and recommended usury as a means of acquiring wealth.  Or they engaged in vast speculations in land, commerce, and slaves, as Crassus did a little later.  The first mentioned class was the least numerous.  To those nobles who gave their attention to money-getting must be added those plebeians who elevated themselves from the masses by means[43] of the curule magistracies.  These were insolent and purse-proud, and greedy to increase their wealth by any means in their power.  Next to these two divisions of the nobility came those whom the patricians had been wont to despise and to relegate to the very lowest rank under the name of aerarii; merchants,[44] manufacturers, bankers, and farmers of the revenues.  These men were powerful by reason of their union and community of interests, and money which they commanded.  They formed a third order and even became so powerful as to control the senate and, at times, the whole republic.  In the time of the Punic wars the senate had been obliged to let go unpunished the crimes committed by the publican Posthumius and the means which he had employed in order to enrich himself at the expense of the republic, because it was imprudent to offend[45] the order of publicans.  Thus constituted an order or guild, they held it in their hands at will to advance or to withhold the money for carrying on wars or sustaining the public credit.  In this way they were the masters of the state.  They also grasped the public lands, as they were able to command such wealth that no individual could compete with them.  They thus became the only farmers of the domain lands, and they did not hesitate to cease paying all tax on these.  Who was able to demand these rents from them?  The senate?  But they either composed the senate or controlled it.  The magistrates?  There was no magistracy but that of wealth.  The tribunes and the people?  These they had disarmed by frequent grants of land of two to seven jugera each, and by the establishment of numerous colonies.  This was beyond doubt the real reason for their frequent distributions.  They had all been made from land recently conquered.  The ancient ager had not been touched, and little by little the Licinian law had fallen into disuetude.

[Footnote 1:  Livy, VIII, 11, 12.]

[Footnote 2:  Ihne, I, 447.]

[Footnote 3:  I have followed Ihne and Arnold in giving this date, but there is reason for placing it later as Valerius Maximus says, IV, 3,5:  “Manius Curius cum Italia Pyrrhum regem exegisset ... decretis a senatu septenis jugeribus agri populo.”]

[Footnote 4:  “Manii Curii nota conscio est, perniciosum intellegi civem cui septem jugera non essent satis.”  Pliny, Hist.  Nat., XVIII.; Aurelius Victor, De Viris Illus.:  Septenis “jugeribus viritim dividendis, quibus qui contentus non esset, eum perniciosum intellegi civem, nota et praeclare concione Manius Curius dictitabat.”  The same author speaks of four jugera being given by Curius, “Quaterna dono agri jugera viritim populo dividit.”  Juvenal implies a distribution of two jugera; Sat.  XIV, V, 161-164: