requisite of all was an age of comparative peace--a healthy
atmosphere in which the patient could recover his natural tone. Next
in importance was the removal of the incitement to enrich yourself and
to spend illegally or unprofitably, and the revival of a sense of duty
towards the State and its rulers. Provincial governors were made
more really responsible, and a scientific census revealed the actual
tax-paying capacity of the provincials; tax-farming was more closely
superintended and gradually disappeared. It is true enough that even
under the Empire great fortunes were made and lost, but the gambling
spirit, the wild recklessness in monetary dealings, are not met with
again. The Roman Forum ceased to be insane, and Italy became once more
the home of much happy and useful country life. The passionate and
reckless self-consciousness of Catullus is succeeded in the next
generation by the calm sweet hopefulness of Virgil; in passing from
the one poet to the other, we feel that we are leaving behind us an
age of over-sensitive self-seeking and entering on one in which duty
and honour, labour on the land and hard work for the State, may be
reckoned as things more likely to make life worth living than all the
accumulated capital of a Crassus.

CHAPTER IV

THE GOVERNING ARISTOCRACY

Above the men of business of equestrian rank, in social standing
though not necessarily in wealth, there was in Cicero's time an
aristocracy which a Roman of that day would perhaps have found it a
little difficult to explain or define to a foreigner. Fortunately all
foreigners coming to Rome would know what was meant by the senate,
the great council which received envoys from all nations outside the
Empire; and the stranger might be told in the first place that all
members of that august assembly, with their families, were considered
as elevated above the equestrian order, and as forming the main body
of the aristocracy proper. But if the informant were by chance a
conservative Roman of old family, he might proceed to qualify this
definition. "There are now in the senate," he might say, "plenty of
men who are only there because they have held the quaestorship, which
Sulla made the qualification for a seat, and there are many equites
whom Sulla made into senators by the form of a vote of the people;
such men, even the great orator Cicero himself, I do not reckon as
really members of the nobility, because they do not belong to old
fami