en that the money-lenders had an enormous business, even
in Rome alone, and risky as it undoubtedly was, it must often have
been a profitable one. And it was not only at Rome that men were
borrowing and lending, but over the whole Empire. For reasons which it
would need an economic treatise to explain, private men, cities, and
even kings were in want of money; it was needed to meet the increased
cost of living and the constantly increasing standard of living among
the educated;[135] it was needed by the cities of Greece and the East
to repair the damages done in the wars of the last three hundred
years; it was needed by the poorer provincials to pay the taxes for
which neither the publicani nor the Roman government could afford to
wait; and it was needed by the kings who had come within the dismal
shadow of the Roman Empire, in order to carry on their own government,
or to satisfy the demands of the neighbouring provincial governor, or
to bribe the ruling men at Rome to get some decree passed in their
favour. Cicero, at the end of his life, looking back to his own
consulship in 63, says that at no time in his recollection was the
whole world in such a condition of indebtedness,[136] and in a famous
passage in his second Catilinarian oration he has drawn a picture of
the various classes of debtors in Rome and Italy at that time (_Cat._
ii. Sec. 18 foll.). He tells us of those who have wealth and yet will not
pay their debts; of those who are in debt and look to a revolution to
absolve them; of the veterans of the Sullan army, settled in colonies
such as Faesulae, who had rushed into debt in order to live luxurious
lives; of old debtors of the city, getting deeper and deeper into the
quagmire, who joined the conspiracy as a last desperate venture. There
was in fact in that famous year a real social fermentation going on,
caused by economic disturbance of the most serious kind; the germs of
the disease can be traced back to the Hannibalic war and its effects
on Italy, but all the symptoms had been continually exacerbated by the
negligence and ignorance of the government, and brought to a head by
the Social and Civil Wars in 90-82 B.C. In 63 the State escaped an
economic catastrophe through the vigilance of Cicero and the alliance
of the respectable classes under his leadership. In 49, and again in
48, it escaped a similar disaster through the good sense of Caesar and
his agents, who succeeded in steering between Scylla and C