ed his speeches, and
exercised on his behalf such influence as they possessed. The standing
of a prominent Roman was apt to be measured by the number and quality
of the persons thus attaching themselves to him. If next it is
remembered that very few money-making occupations were looked upon
with favour by the Romans, and that the higher orders were for the
most part very rich, it will be obvious that there would grow up the
custom of the patron making liberal presents to his dependants--money
gifts, or gifts of small properties and of useful articles--as well as
of inviting them to his table. The clients themselves brought little
presents on the patron's birthday or some other special occasion, but
these were merely the sprats to catch the whale. It gradually resulted
that the patronage extended by the aristocrat or plutocrat was mainly
one of a direct pecuniary nature. As in other cases where a dubious
custom develops gradually, there ceased to be any shame in this
relation. Many members of the middle class, impoverished and earning
practically no other income, lived the life of genteel paupers. They
would attend the morning reception of a grandee, either bringing with
them, or causing a slave to bring, a small basket, or even a portable
cooking-stove, in which they carried off doles of food distributed
through his servants. The scene must have borne no slight resemblance
to that of the charity "soup-kitchen." In process of time, however,
this practice became inconvenient for all parties, and most of the
patrons compounded for such doles by making a fixed payment, still
called the "little basket," amounting perhaps to a shilling in modern
weight of money for each day of polite attention on the part of a
recognised "client." If a client was acknowledged by more than one
patron, so much the better for the amount of his "little baskets." In
some cases the dole was paid to each visitor at the morning call; in
others only after the work of the patron's day was done and when he
had gone to the elaborate bath which preceded his dinner in the later
part of the afternoon. By this means the complimentary escort duty was
secured until that time.

Among the dependants were nearly all the genteel unemployed of Rome,
including the Grub-Street men of letters, who in those days could make
little, if anything, by their books, and who therefore sought the same
kind of assistance as did our own literary rank and file in the early
eighte