[132].

Your argentarius would also attend for you, or appoint an agent to
attend, at any public auction in which you were interested as seller
or purchaser, and would pay or receive the money for you,--a practice
which must have greatly helped him in getting to know the current
value of all kinds of property, and indeed in learning to understand
human nature on its business side. In the passage from the _pro
Caecina_ quoted just now, a lady, Caesennia, wished to buy an estate;
she employs an agent, Aebutius, no doubt recommended by her banker,
and to him the estate is knocked down. He undertakes that the
argentarius of the vendor, who is present at the auction, shall be
paid the value, and this is ultimately done by Caesennia, and the sum
entered in the banker's books (tabulae).

But perhaps the most important part of the business was the finding
money for those who were in want of it, i.e. making advances on
interest. The poor man who was in need of ready money could get it
from the argentarius in coin if he had any security to offer, and,
as we saw in the last chapter, might get entangled more and more
hopelessly in the nets of the money-lender. Whether the same
argentarius did this small business and also the work of supplying the
rich man with credit, we do not know; it may have been the case that
the great money-lenders like Atticus themselves employed argentarii,
and so kept them going. That Atticus would undertake, anyhow, for a
friend like Cicero, any amount of money-finding, we know well from
many letters of Cicero, written when he was anxious to buy a piece
of land at any cost on which to erect a shrine to his beloved
daughter[133]; and we may be pretty sure that Atticus could not have
done all that Cicero importunately pressed upon him if he had not had
a number of useful professional agents at command. From these same
letters we also learn that finding money by no means necessarily meant
finding coin; in a society where every one was lending or borrowing,
and probably doing both at the same time, what actually passed was
chiefly securities, mortgages, debts, and so on. If you wanted to hand
over a hundred thousand or so to a creditor, what your agent had as
often as not to do was to persuade that creditor to accept as payment
the debts owing to yourself from others, i.e. you would hand over to
him, if he would accept them, the bonds or other securities given you
by your own debtors.[134]

It is plain th