for the Italian agriculturist turned to account large tracts
in the provinces by rearing cattle and even cultivating corn.

Money-Dealing

In order to show what dimensions money-dealing assumed by the side
of this estate-husbandry unnaturally prospering over the ruin
of the small farmers, how the Italian merchants vying with the Jews
poured themselves into all the provinces and client-states
of the empire, and how all capital ultimately flowed to Rome,
it will be sufficient, after what has been already said, to point
to the single fact that in the money-market of the capital the regular
rate of interest at this time was six per cent, and consequently
money there was cheaper by a half than it was on an average
elsewhere in antiquity.

Social Disproportion

In consequence of this economic system based both in its agrarian
and mercantile aspects on masses of capital and on speculation,
there arose a most fearful disproportion in the distribution
of wealth. The often-used and often-abused phrase of a commonwealth
composed of millionaires and beggars applies perhaps nowhere
so completely as to the Rome of the last age of the republic;
and nowhere perhaps has the essential maxim of the slave-state--
that the rich man who lives by the exertions of his slaves
is necessarily respectable, and the poor man who lives by the labour
of his hands is necessarily vulgar--been recognized with so terrible
a precision as the undoubted principle underlying all public
and private intercourse.(51) A real middle class in our sense
of the term there was not, as indeed no such class can exist
in any fully-developed slave-state; what appears as if it were
a good middle class and is so in a certain measure, is composed
of those rich men of business and landholders who are so uncultivated
or so highly cultivated as to content themselves within the sphere
of their activity and to keep aloof from public life. Of the men
of business--a class, among whom the numerous freedmen and other
upstarts, as a rule, were seized with the giddy fancy of playing
the man of quality--there were not very many who showed so much judgment.
A model of this sort was the Titus Pomponius Atticus frequently mentioned
in the accounts of this period. He acquired an immense fortune
partly from the great estate-farming which he prosecuted in Italy
and Epirus, partly from his money-transactions which ramified throughout
Italy, Greece, Macedonia, and Asia Minor; but at t