d give him and his fellow
citizens aesthetic satisfaction tion But if a rich New Yorker should give
a large sum to mend the pavement in Union Square or extend the sewer
system on Canal Street, a judicial inquiry into his sanity would not be
thought out of place. But the inscriptions show us that rich citizens
throughout the Roman Empire frequently made large contributions for just
such unromantic purposes. It is unfortunate that a record of the annual
income and expenses of some Italian or Gallic town has not come down to
us. It would be interesting, for instance, to compare the budget of Mantua
or Ancona, in the first century of our era, with that of Princeton or
Cambridge in the twentieth. But, although we rarely know the sums which
were expended for particular purposes, a mere comparison of the objects
for which they were spent is illuminating. The items in the ancient budget
which find no place in our own, and vice versa, are significant of certain
striking differences between ancient and modern municipal life.

Common to the ancient and the modern city are expenditures for the
construction and maintenance of public buildings, sewers, aqueducts, and
streets, but with these items the parallelism ends. The ancient objects
of expenditure which find no place in the budget of an American town are
the repair of the town walls, the maintenance of public worship, the
support of the baths, the sale of grain at a low price, and the giving of
games and theatrical performances. It is very clear that the ancient
legislator made certain provisions for the physical and spiritual welfare
of his fellow citizens which find little or no place in our municipal
arrangements to-day. If, among the sums spent for the various objects
mentioned above, we compare the amounts set apart for religion and for the
baths, we may come to the conclusion that the Roman read the old saying,
"Cleanliness is next to godliness" in the amended form "Cleanliness is
next above godliness." No city in the Empire seems to have been too small
or too poor to possess public baths, and how large an item of annual
expense their care was is clear from the fact that an article of the
Theodosian code provided that cities should spend at least one-third of
their incomes on the heating of the baths and the repair of the walls. The
great idle population of the city of Rome had to be provided with food at
public expense. Otherwise riot and disorder would have followed, but i