an agriculture was beginning, and more especially the cultivation
of the olive and the vine; Varro, some twenty years later, could claim
that Italy was the best cultivated country in the world.[148] It may
be that the din of the "insanum forum" and its wild speculation has
prevented our hearing of the quiet efforts in the country to put
capital to a legitimate productive use. But of the social life of the
city the Forum was the heart, and of any prudent or scientific use of
capital the Forum knew hardly anything.

Of the two classes of business men we have been describing, the
tax-farmers and the money-lenders, it is hard to say which wrought the
most mischief in the Empire; they played into each other's hands in
wringing money out of the helpless provincials. Together too they did
incalculable harm, morally and socially, among the upper strata of
Roman society at home. Economic maladies react upon the mental, and
moral condition of a State. Where the idea of making money for its
own sake, or merely for the sake of the pleasure derivable from
excitement, is paramount in the minds of so large a section of
society, moral perception quickly becomes warped. The sense of justice
disappears, because when the fever is on a man he does not stop to ask
whether his gains are ill-gotten; and in this age the only restriction
on the plundering of the subjects of the Empire was a legal one, and
that of no great efficacy. There are many repulsive things in the
exquisite poetry of Catullus, but none of them jar on the modern mind
quite so sharply as his virulent attacks on a provincial governor in
whose suite he had gone to Bithynia in the hope of enriching himself,
and under whose just administration he had failed to do so. There
is lost also the sense of a duty arising out of the possession of
wealth--the feeling that it should do some good in the world, or at
least be in part applied to some useful purpose. Lastly, the exciting
pursuit of wealth helps to produce a curious restlessness and
instability of character, of which we have many examples in the age
we are studying. "Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel," are words
that might be applied to many a young man among Cicero's acquaintance,
and to many women also.

No sudden operation could cure these evils--they needed the careful
and gradual treatment of a wise physician. As in so many other ways,
so here Augustus showed his wonderful instinct as a social reformer.
The first