After the “rabble” we will take the “people” in the sense current at this date.  We must begin by adjusting our notions somewhat.  The Romans made no such clear distinction as we do between trades and professions.  To perform work for others and to receive pay for it is to be a hireling.  Painters, sculptors, physicians, surgeons, and auctioneers are but more highly paid and more pleasantly engaged hirelings.  Only so far do they differ from sign-painters, masons, undertakers, or criers.  No doubt the theory broke down somewhat in practice, yet such is the theory.  That which in our day constitutes a “liberal” profession—­a previous liberal education and a high code of professional etiquette—­can hardly be said to have existed in the case of corresponding professions at Rome.  If the liberality departs from our own professional education and the etiquette is relaxed, we shall presumably revert to the same state of things.  A surgeon was commonly a “sawbones,” and a physician a compounder and prescriber of more or less empirical drugs.  Their knowledge and skill were by no means contemptible, and their instruments and pharmacopoeia were surprisingly modern.  Among the Greeks and Orientals their social standing was high, but at Rome, where they were chiefly foreigners, for the most part Greeks, the old aristocratic exclusiveness kept them in comparatively humble estimation, however large might be their fees in the more important cases.  Something will be said later as to the state of science and knowledge in the Roman world.  For the present it is sufficient to note that artist, medical man, attorney, schoolmaster, and clerk belong theoretically to the common “people,” along with butchers, bakers, carpenters, and potters.

[Illustration:  FIG. 69.—­SURGICAL INSTRUMENTS. (Pompeii.)]

Setting aside the aristocratic and wealthy classes on the one hand, and the pauperised class on the other, we have lying between them the workers, whether native Romans or the emancipated slaves, who are now citizens known as “freedmen.”  To these we must add the rather shabby genteel persons whom we have already described as “clients.”  Among workers are found men and women of all the callings most familiar to ourselves, with one exception.  They do not include domestic servants.  Romans who could afford regular servants kept slaves.  It 18 true that occasionally one of the poorer citizens, even a soldier on furlough, might perform some menial task connected with a household, such as hewing wood or carrying burdens; but such services were regarded as “servile.”  With this exception there is scarcely an occupation in which Roman citizens did not engage.  In such work they often had to compete with slave-labour.  It is probable, doubtless, that the greater proportion of the slave body were employed as domestic servants.  But many others tilled the lands of the larger proprietors.  Others laboured under the contractors who constructed the public works.  Others were used as assistants