Everywhere was the same crowd; shopping parties were pressing in and out the stores, outrunners and foot-boys were continually colliding.  Drusus’s escort could barely win a slow progress for their master.  Once on the Sacred Way the advance was more rapid; although even this famous street was barely twenty-two feet wide from house wall to house wall.  Here was the “Lombard” or “Wall Street” of antiquity.  Here were the offices of the great banking houses and syndicates that held the world in fee.  Here centred those busy equites, the capitalists, whose transactions ran out even beyond the lands covered by the eagles, so that while Gaul was yet unconquered, Cicero could boast, “not a sesterce in Gaul changes hands without being entered in a Roman ledger.”  And here were brokers whose clients were kings, and who by their “influence” almost made peace or war, like modern Rothschilds.

Thither Drusus’s litter carried him, for he knew that his first act on coming to Rome to take possession of his uncle’s property should be to consult without delay his agent and financial and legal adviser, lest any loophole be left for a disappointed fortune-hunter to contest the will.  The bearers put him down before the important firm of Flaccus and Sophus.  Out from the open, windowless office ran the senior partner, Sextus Fulvius Flaccus, a stout, comfortable, rosy-faced old eques, who had half Rome as his financial clients, the other half in his debt.  Many were his congratulations upon Drusus’s manly growth, and many more upon the windfall of Vibulanus’s fortune, which, as he declared, was too securely conveyed to the young man to be open to any legal attack.

But when Drusus intimated that he expected soon to invite the good man to his marriage feast, Flaccus shook his head.

“You will never get a sesterce of Cornelia’s dowry,” he declared.  “Her uncle Lentulus Crus is head over ears in debt.  Nothing can save him, unless—­”

“I don’t understand you,” said the other.

“Well,” continued Flaccus, “to be frank; unless there is nothing short of a revolution.”

“Will it come to that?” demanded Drusus.

“Can’t say,” replied Flaccus, as if himself perplexed.  “Everybody declares Caesar and Pompeius are dreadfully alienated.  Pompeius is joining the Senate.  Half the great men of Rome are in debt, as I have cause to know, and unless we have an overturn, with ‘clean accounts’ as a result, more than one noble lord is ruined.  I am calling in all my loans, turning everything into cash.  Credit is bad—­bad.  Caesar paid Curio’s debts—­sixty millions of sesterces.[47] That’s why Curio is a Caesarian now.  Oh! money is the cause of all these vile political changes!  Trouble is coming!  Sulla’s old throat cuttings will be nothing to it!  But don’t marry Lentulus’s niece!”

  [47] I.e. $2,400,000; a sesterce was about 4 cents.

“Well,” said Drusus, when the business was done, and he turned to go, “I want Cornelia, not her dowry.”