ill up the legions, nor
seamen to man the fleet, nor money in the treasury. Slaves, who were
to be employed as soldiers, were purchased on condition of their price
being paid to the owners at the end of the war. The farmers of the
revenues had declared, that they would contract to supply corn and
other matters, which the exigencies of the war required, to be paid
for at the same time. We gave up our slaves to the oar, in numbers
proportioned to our properties, and paid them out of our own incomes.
All our gold and silver, in imitation of the example given by the
senators, we dedicated to the use of the public. Widows and minors
lodged their money in the treasury. It was provided by law that we
should not keep in our houses more than a certain quantity of wrought
gold or silver, or more than a certain sum of coined silver or brass.
At such a time as this, were the matrons so eagerly engaged in
luxury and dress, that the Oppian law was requisite to repress such
practices; when the senate, because the sacrifice of Ceres had been
omitted, in consequence of all the matrons being in mourning, ordered
the mourning to end in thirty days? Who does not clearly see, that
the poverty and distress of the state, requiring that every private
person's money should be converted to the use of the public, enacted
that law, with intent that it should remain in force so long only as
the cause of enacting the law should remain? For if all the decrees
of the senate and orders of the people, which were then made to answer
the necessities of the times, are to be of perpetual obligation, why
do we refund their money to private persons? Why do we contract for
public works for ready money? Why are not slaves brought to serve in
the army? Why do not we, private subjects, supply rowers as we did
then?

7. "Shall, then, every other class of people, every individual, feel
the improvement in the condition of the state; and shall our wives
alone reap none of the fruits of the public peace and tranquillity?
Shall we men have the use of purple, wearing the purple-bordered gown
in magistracies and priests' offices? Shall our children wear gowns
bordered with purple? Shall we allow the privilege of wearing the toga
praetexta to the magistrates of the colonies and borough towns, and
to the very lowest of them here at Rome, the superintendents of the
streets; and not only of wearing such an ornament of distinction while
alive, but of being buried with it whe