finance.  As yet they were chiefly the hucksters and petty traders, notorious for their strange habits and for the fanaticism of their religion, which nevertheless exercised a strange potency and made many proselytes even in high places, especially among the women.  Poppaea, the wife of Nero himself, is commonly considered to have been such a proselyte, although the strange notion that she herself was a Jewess is without any sort of foundation.  It is a common error to suppose that the Jews came to Rome only after the destruction of Jerusalem.  The dispersion had occurred long before Rome had anything to do with Judaea, and naturally the enterprising Jew was to be found in all profitable places, whether in Alexandria, Antioch, Smyrna, Corinth, Rome, or farther afield.

In the political sense all these foreigners belonged to their own provinces and communities.  They might be citizens there, but they were not citizens at Rome.  At Rome they had no public claims and no official career, unless—­as not seldom happened—­they received, for some service or some distinction, the gift of the Roman citizenship.  Sometimes the citizenship was given wholesale to a town, or even to a province.  How the Hebrew father or grandfather of St. Paul became a Roman citizen, we do not know.  Their own abilities or the emperor’s favour might carry such citizens, or their children, up all the steps which were open to the ordinary Roman.

After the foreigners come the slaves.  At Rome itself they formed about one-third of the population.  This is not the moment for any detailed account of their employment, their treatment, or their liberation.

Suffice it for the present that the slave possessed no rights at all.  He was the chattel of his master, who possessed over him the full power of life and death, limited only by public opinion and prudential considerations.  A Roman might have at his disposal one slave or ten thousand slaves.  He could use them as he liked, kill them if he chose, and, subject to certain limitations, set them free if he willed, provided that he did not set too many free at once.  The last restriction was especially necessary, inasmuch as a slave who was manumitted by his master with the proper ceremonies became ipso facto a Roman citizen, but was still bound by certain ties of loyalty to his former master.  For a Roman to possess too large an attachment of “freedmen,” as they were called, might prove dangerous.  The “freedman,” though a citizen, could not himself enter upon a public career; neither, in ordinary circumstances, could his children; but in the third generation the family stood on an entire equality with any other Roman family in that respect.