knight, or who had been degraded from his rank
because he had wasted his credit and his money and no longer possessed
either L3200 or a reputation, ventured to seat himself in the fourteen
rows in the hope of being unnoticed, he would be speedily called upon
by the usher to withdraw. Snobs occasionally made the attempt, and, at
a somewhat later date, we have an amusing epigram of Martial
concerning one who repeatedly but unsuccessfully dodged the usher and
who was at last compelled to kneel in the gangway opposite the end of
the fourteenth row, where it might look to those behind as if he were
sitting among the knights, while technically he could claim that he
was not sitting at all.

Elsewhere also, as for instance at the chariot-races in the Circus,
and at the gladiatorial shows in the amphitheatre, there were special
places set apart for the two orders.

Below the senators and the knights came the "people,"--the "commons,"
or "third estate"--with all its usual grades and its usual variety of
occupation or no occupation, of manners and character or absence of
both. With the life of these, as with the life of a noble, we shall
deal at the proper time.

So much for the Roman citizen proper. Other elements of the population
were the foreigners. At Rome these were exceedingly numerous, and the
city may in this respect be called--as indeed it was called--a
microcosm, a small copy or epitome of the Roman world. Gauls,
Africans, Greeks, Jews, Syrians, and Egyptians were perhaps the most
commonly to be seen, but particularly prominent were the Greeks and
the Jews. The Greeks were recognised above all as the clever men, the
artists, the social entertainers, and the literary guides. The Jews,
who formed a sort of colony in what is now known as Trastevere--the
low-lying quarter across the Tiber--were not yet the princes of high
finance. As yet they were chiefly the hucksters and petty traders,
notorious for their strange habits and for the fanaticism of their
religion, which nevertheless exercised a strange potency and made many
proselytes even in high places, especially among the women. Poppaea,
the wife of Nero himself, is commonly considered to have been such a
proselyte, although the strange notion that she herself was a Jewess
is without any sort of foundation. It is a common error to suppose
that the Jews came to Rome only after the destruction of Jerusalem.
The dispersion had occurred long before Rome had anything to d