other purposes (_publicani_). Of these two
upper classes and their social life we shall see something in later
chapters; at present we are concerned with the "masses," at least
320,000 in number,[39] and the social problems which their existence
presented, or ought to have presented, to an intelligent Roman
statesman of Cicero's time.

Unfortunately, just as we know but little of the populous districts of
Rome, so too we know little of its industrial population. The upper
classes, including all writers of memoirs and history, were not
interested in them. There was no philanthropist, no devoted inquirer
like Mr. Charles Booth, to investigate their condition or try to
ameliorate it. The statesman, if he troubled himself about them at
all, looked on them as a dangerous element of society, only to be
considered as human beings at election time; at all other times merely
as animals that had to be fed, in order to keep them from becoming an
active peril. The philosopher, even the Stoic, whose creed was by far
the most ennobling in that age, seems to have left the dregs of the
people quite out of account; though his philosophy nominally took the
whole of mankind into its cognisance, it believed the masses to be
degraded and vicious, and made no effort to redeem them.[40] The Stoic
might profess the tenderest feeling towards all mankind, as Cicero
did, when moved by some recent reading of Stoic doctrine; he might say
that "men were born for the sake of men, that each should help the
other," or that "Nature has inclined us to love men, for this is the
foundation of all law";[41] but when in actual social or political
contact with the same masses Cicero could only speak of them with
contempt or disgust. It is a melancholy and significant fact that what
little we do know from literature about this class is derived from the
part they occasionally played in riots and revolutionary disorders.
It is fortunately quite impossible that the historian of the future
should take account of the life of the educated and wealthy only; but
in the history of the past and especially of the last three centuries
B.C., we have to contend with this difficulty, and can only now and
then find side-lights thrown upon the great mass of mankind. The
crime, the crowding, the occasional suffering from starvation and
pestilence, in the unfashionable quarters of such a city as Rome,
these things are hidden from us, and rarely even suggested by the
histories