what to do with them than ever she had of old.  If the egos (of Crest-Wave standing) had come in as quickly as did the shekels, things might have gone manageably; but they did not by any means.  Her great misfortune was to enter the world-currents only on the material plane; to find her poor little peasant-bandit-souled self mistress of the world and its money, and still provincial to the core and with no ideas of bigness that were not of the earth earthy; with nothing whatever that was both spiritual and Roman to thrill to life the higher side of her;—­a multimillionaire that could hardly read or write, and knew no means of spending her money that was not essentially vulgar.  She had given up her sole means of salvation—­which was hoeing cabbages; her slaves did all that for her now;—­and so was at a loss for employment; and Satan found plenty of mischief for her idle hands to do.  There were huge all-day-long banquets, where you took your emetic from time to time to keep you going.  There were slaves,—­armies of them; to have no more than a dozen personal attendants was poverty.  There were slaves from the East to minister to your vices; some might cost as much as five thousand dollars; and there were dirt-cheap Sardinians and ‘barbarians’ of all sorts to run your estates and farms.  All the work of Italy was done by slave labor; and the city swarmed with an immense slave population; the country slaves with enough of manhood left in them to rise and butcher and torture their masters when they could; the city slaves, one would say, in no condition to keep the semblance of a soul in them at all,—­living dead.  For the most part both were shamefully treated; Cato,—­ high old Republican Cato, type of the free and nobly simple Roman—­used to see personally to the scourging of his slaves daily after dinner, as a help to his digestion.—­So the rich wasted their money and their lives.  They bought estates galore, and built villas on them; Cicero had—­was it eighteen?—­ country-houses.  They bought up Greek art-treasures, of which they had no appreciation whatever,—­and which therefore only helped to vulgarize them.  Such things were costly, and thought highly of in Greece; so Rome would have them for her money, and have them en masse. Mummius brought over a shipload; and solemnly warned his sailors that they would have to replace any they might break or lose.  The originals, or such substitutes as the sailors might supply,—­it was all one to him.  As to literature,—­well, we have seen how it began with translations made by a Greek slave, Livius Andronicus, who put certain Hellenistic comedies and the Odyssey into Latin ballad meters; the kind of verse you would expect from a slave ordered promiscuously by his master to get busy and do it.  Then came Father Ennius; and here I shall diverge a little to try to show you what (as I think) really happened to the soul of Rome.