In consequence of this economic system based both in its agrarian and mercantile aspects on masses of capital and on speculation, there arose a most fearful disproportion in the distribution of wealth. The often-used and often-abused phrase of a commonwealth composed of millionaires and beggars applies perhaps nowhere so completely as to the Rome of the last age of the republic; and nowhere perhaps has the essential maxim of the slave-state - that the rich man who lives by the exertions of his slaves is necessarily respectable, and the poor man who lives by the labour of his hands is necessarily vulgar - been recognized with so terrible a precision as the undoubted principle underlying all public and private intercourse[51]. A real middle class in our sense of the term there was not, as indeed no such class can exist in any fully-developed slave-state; what appears as if it were a good middle class and is so in a certain measure, is composed of those rich men of business and landholders who are so uncultivated or so highly cultivated as to content themselves within the sphere of their activity and to keep aloof from public life. Of the men of business - a class, among whom the numerous freedmen and other upstarts, as a rule, were seized with the giddy fancy of playing the man of quality - there were not very many who showed so much judgment.
A model of this sort was the Titus Pomponius Atticus frequently mentioned in the accounts of this period. He acquired an immense fortune partly from the great estate-farming which he prosecuted in Italy and Epirus, partly from his money-transactions which ramified throughout Italy, Greece, Macedonia, and Asia Minor; but at the same time he continued to be throughout the simple man of business, did not allow himself to be seduced into soliciting office or even into monetary transactions with the state, and, equally remote from the avaricious niggardliness and from the prodigal and burdensome luxury of his time - his table, for instance, was maintained at a daily cost of 100 sesterces (1 pound) - contented himself with an easy existence appropriating to itself the charms of a country and a city life, the pleasures of intercourse with the best society of Rome and Greece, and all the enjoyments of literature and art.
More numerous and more solid were the Italian landholders of the old type. Contemporary literature preserves in the description of Sextus Roscius, who was murdered amidst the proscriptions of 673, the picture of such a rural nobleman (
Far more than the circles of the nobility with their cosmopolitan culture and the mercantile class at home everywhere and nowhere, these landlords and the 'country town', to which they essentially gave tone (
But the cultivated class of merchants and the vigorous order of landlords were far overgrown by the two classes that gave tone to society - the mass of beggars, and the world of quality proper.
We have no statistical figures to indicate precisely the relative proportions of poverty and riches for this epoch; yet we may here perhaps again recall the expression which a Roman statesman employed some fifty years before[52] - that the number of families of firmly-established riches among the Roman burgesses did not amount to 2000. The burgess-body had since then become different; but clear indications attest that the disproportion between poor and rich had remained at least as great. The increasing impoverishment of the multitude shows itself only too plainly in their crowding to the corn-largesses and to enlistment in the army; the corresponding increase of riches is attested expressly by an author of this generation, when, speaking of the circumstances of the Marian period, he describes an estate of 2,000,000 sesterces (20,000 pounds) as 'riches according to the circumstances of that day'; and the statements which we find as to the property of individuals lead to the same conclusion. The very rich Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus promised to twenty thousand soldiers four
The effect of such poverty and such riches was on both sides an economic and moral disorganization outwardly different, but at bottom of the same character. If the common man was saved from starvation only by support from the resources of the state, it was the necessary consequence of this mendicant misery - although it also reciprocally appears as a cause of it - that he addicted himself to the beggar's laziness and to the beggar's good cheer. The Roman plebeian was fonder of gazing in the theatre than of working; the taverns and brothels were so frequented, that the demagogues found their special account in gaining the possessors of such establishments over to their interests. The gladiatorial games - which revealed, at the same time that they fostered, the worst demoralization of the ancient world - had become so flourishing that a lucrative business was done in the sale of the programmes for them; and it was at this time that the horrible innovation was adopted by which the decision as to the life or death of the vanquished became dependent, not on the law of duel or on the pleasure of the victor, but onthe caprice of the onlooking public, and according to its signal the victor either spared or transfixed his prostrate antagonist.
The trade of fighting had so risen or freedom had so fallen in value, that the intrepidity and the emulation, which were lacking on the battle fields of this age, were universal in the armies of the arena and, where the law of the duel required, every gladiator allowed himself to be stabbed mutely and without shrinking; that in fact free men not unfrequently sold themselves to the contractors for board and wages as gladiatorial slaves. The plebeians of the fifth century had also suffered want and famine, but they had not sold their freedom; and still less would the jurisconsults of that period have lent themselves to pronounce the equally immoral and illegal contract of such a gladiatorial slave 'to let himself be chained, scourged, burnt or killed without opposition, if the laws of the institution should so requir', by means of unbecoming juristic subtleties as a contract lawful and actionable.
In the world of quality such things did not occur, but at bottom it was hardly different, and least of all better. In doing nothing the aristocrat boldly competed with the proletarian; if the latter lounged on the pavement, the former lay in bed till far on in the day. Extravagance prevailed here as unbounded as it was devoid of taste. It was lavished on politics and on the theatre, of course to the corruption of both; the consular office was purchased at an incredible price - in the summer of 700 the first voting-division alone was paid 10,000,000 sesterces (100,000 pounds) - and all the pleasure of the man of culture in the drama was spoilt by the insane luxury of decoration. Rents in Rome appear to have been on an average four times as high as in the country-towns; a house there was once sold for 15,000,000 sesterces (150,000 pounds).
The house of Marcus Lepidus (consul in 676) which was at the time of the death of Sulla the finest in Rome, did not rank a generation afterwards even as the hundredth on the list of Roman palaces. We have already mentioned the extravagance practised in the matter of country-houses; we find that 4,000,000 sesterces (40,000 pounds) were paid for such a house, which was valued chiefly for its fishpond; and the thoroughly fashionable grandee now needed at least two villas - one in the Sabine or Alban mountains near the capital, and a second in the vicinity of the Campanian baths - and in addition if possible a garden immediately outside of the gates of Rome. Still more irrational than these villa-palaces were the palatial sepulchres, several of which still existing at
