g of
Minerva from Etruria ... little knew that in her temple on the
Aventine was being brought to expression the trade-union idea."[76]
These _collegia opificum_, most unfortunately, pass entirely out
of our sight, until they reappear in the age of Cicero in a very
different form, as clubs used for political purposes, but composed
still of the lowest strata of the free population (_collegia
sodalicia_).[77] The history and causes of their disappearance and
metamorphosis are lost to us; but it is not hard to guess that the
main cause is to be found in the great economic changes that followed
the Hannibalic war,--the vast number of slaves imported, and
the consequent resuscitation of the old system of the economic
independence of the great households; the decay of religious practice,
which affected both public and private life in a hundred different
ways; and that steady growth of individualism which is characteristic
of eras of town life, and especially of the last three centuries B.C.
It is curious to notice that by the time these old gilds emerge into
light again as clubs that could be used for political purposes, a new
source of gain, and one that was really sordid, had been placed within
the reach of the Roman plebs urbana: it was possible to make money by
your vote in the election of magistrates. In that degenerate when the
vast accumulation of capital made it possible for a man to purchase
his way to power, in spite of repeated attempts to check the evil by
legislation, the old principle of honourable association was used to
help the small man to make a living by choosing the unprincipled and
often the incompetent to undertake the government of the Empire.

Apart, however, from such illegal means of making money, there was
beyond doubt in the Rome of the last century B.C. a large amount of
honest and useful labour done by free citizens. We must not run away
with the idea that the whole labour of the city was performed by
slaves, who ousted the freeman from his chance of a living. There was
indeed a certain number of public slaves who did public work for the
State; but on the whole the great mass of the servile population
worked entirely within the households and on the estates of the rich,
and did not interfere to any sensible degree with the labour of the
small freeman. As has been justly observed by Salvioli,[78] never at
any period did the Roman proletariat complain of the competition of
slave labour as detrime