ought too obviously a Greek one, let the reader
turn to the description by Livy[72]--a true gentleman--of the low
origin of Terentius Varro, the consul who was in command at Cannae; he
uses the same language as Cicero. "He sprang from an origin not merely
humble but sordid: his father was a butcher, who sold his own meat,
and employed his son in this slavish business." The story may not be
true, and indeed it is not a very probable one, but it well represents
the inherited feeling towards retail trade of the Roman of the higher
classes of society,--a feeling so tenacious of life, that even in
modern England, where it arose from much the same causes as in the
ancient world, it has only within the last century begun to die
out.[73]

Yet in Rome these humble workers existed and made a living for
themselves from the very beginning, as far as we can guess, of real
city life. They are the necessary and inevitable product of the growth
of a town population, and of the resulting division of labour. The
following passage from a work on industrial organisation in England
may be taken as closely representing the same process in early
Rome:[74] "The town arose as a centre in which the surplus produce of
many villages could be profitably disposed of by exchange. Trade
thus became a settled occupation, and trade prepared the way for
the establishment of the handicrafts, by furnishing capital for the
support of the craftsmen, and by creating a regular market for their
products. It was possible for a great many bodies of craftsmen,--the
weavers, tailors, butchers, bakers, etc., to find a livelihood, each
craft devoting itself to the supply of a single branch of those wants
which the village household had attempted very imperfectly to satisfy
by its own labours."

As in mediaeval Europe, so in early Rome, the same conditions produced
the same results: we find the craftsmen of the town forming themselves
into _gilds_, not only for the protection of their trade, but from a
natural instinct of association, and providing these gilds, on the
model of the older groups of family and gens, with a religious centre
and a patron deity. The gilds (_collegia_) of Roman craftsmen were
attributed to Numa, like so many other religious institutions; they
included associations of weavers, fullers, dyers, shoemakers, doctors,
teachers, painters, etc.,[75] and were mainly devoted to Minerva as
the deity of handiwork. "The society that witnessed the comin