is necessary _at any cost_. "Manage the
business your own way; do not consider what my purse demands--about
that I care nothing--but what I _want_."[144]

Such being the financial method of Cicero and his brother, we cannot
be surprised to find that the younger generation of the family
followed faithfully in the footsteps of their elders. We have seen
that the young Marcus had a large allowance at Athens and on the whole
he seems to have kept fairly well within it, in spite of some trouble;
but his cousin the younger Quintus, coming to see his uncle in
December 45, showed him a gloomy countenance, and on being asked the
meaning of it, said that he was going with Caesar to the Parthian war
in order to avoid his creditors, and presumably to make money to pay
them with.[145] He had not even enough money for the journey out. His
uncle did not offer to give him any, but he does not seem to have
thought very seriously of the young man's embarrassments.

One more example of the financial dealings of the business men of this
extraordinary age, and we will bring this chapter to an end. It is a
story which has luckily been preserved in Cicero's speech in defence
of a certain Rabirius Postumus in the year 54, who was accused under
Caesar's law de pecuniis repetundis (extortion in the provinces). It
is a remarkable revelation of all the most striking methods of making
and using money in the last years of the Republic.

The father of this Rabirius, says Cicero, had been a distinguished
member of the equestrian order, and "fortissimus et maximus
publicanus"; not greedy of money, but most liberal to his friends--in
other words, he was not a miser, for that character was rare in this
age, but lent his money freely in order to acquire influence and
consideration. The son took up the same line of business, and engaged
in a wide sphere of financial operations. He dealt largely in the
stock of the tax-companies; he lent money to cities in several
provinces; he lent money to Ptolemy Auletes, King of Egypt, both
before he was expelled from his kingdom by sedition, and afterwards
when he was in Rome in 59 and 58, intriguing to induce the senate
to have him restored. Rabirius never doubted that he would be so
restored, and seems to have failed to see the probability of such a
policy being contested or quarrelled about, as actually happened in
the winter of 57-56. He lent, and persuaded his friends to lend:[146]
he represented the king's ca