=The Publicans.=—­In every province the Roman people had considerable revenues—­the customs, the mines, the imposts, the grain-lands, and the pastures.  These were farmed out to companies of contractors who were called publicans.  These men bought from the state the right of collecting the impost in a certain place, and the provincials had to obey them as the representatives of the Roman people.  And so in every province there were many companies of publicans, each with a crowd of clerks and collectors.  These people carried themselves as masters, extorted more than was due them, reduced the debtors to misery, sometimes selling them as slaves.  In Asia they even exiled the inhabitants without any pretext.  When Marius required the king of Bithynia to furnish him with soldiers, the king replied that, thanks to the publicans, he had remaining as citizens only women, children, and old people.  The Romans were well informed of these excesses.  Cicero wrote to his brother, then a governor, “If you find the means of satisfying the publicans without letting the provincials be destroyed, it is because you have the attributes of a god.”  But the publicans were judged in the tribunals and the proconsuls themselves obeyed them.  Scaurus, the proconsul of Asia, a man of rigid probity,[128] wished to prevent them from pillaging his province; on his return to Rome they had him accused and condemned.

The publicans drove to extremities even the peaceable and submissive inhabitants of the Orient:  in a single night, at the order of Mithradates, 100,000 Romans were massacred.  A century later, in the time of Christ, the word “publican” was synonymous with thief.

=The Bankers.=—­The Romans had heaped up at home the silver of the conquered countries.  And so silver was very abundant in Rome and scarce in the provinces.  At Rome one could borrow at four or five per cent.; in the provinces not less than twelve per cent. was charged.  The bankers borrowed money in Rome and loaned it in the provinces, especially to kings or to cities.  When the exhausted peoples could not return the principal and the interest, the bankers imitated the procedure of the publicans.  In 84 the cities of Asia made a loan to pay an enormous war-levy; fourteen years later, the interest alone had made the debt amount to six times the original amount.  The bankers compelled the cities to sell even their objects of art; parents sold even their children.  Some years later one of the most highly esteemed Romans of his time, Brutus, the Stoic, loaned to the city of Salamis in Cyprus a sum of money at forty-eight per cent. interest (four per cent. a month).  Scaptius, his business manager, demanded the sum with interest; the city could not pay; Scaptius then went in search of the proconsul Appius, secured a squadron of cavalry and came to Salamis to blockade the senate in its hall of assembly; five senators died of famine.