he same time
he continued to be throughout the simple man of business,
did not allow himself to be seduced into soliciting office
or even into monetary transactions with the state,
and, equally remote from the avaricious niggardliness and from the prodigal
and burdensome luxury of his time--his table, for instance,
was maintained at a daily cost of 100 sesterces (1 pound)--
contented himself with an easy existence appropriating to itself
the charms of a country and a city life, the pleasures of intercourse
with the best society of Rome and Greece, and all the enjoyments
of literature and art.

More numerous and more solid were the Italian landholders
of the old type. Contemporary literature preserves in the description
of Sextus Roscius, who was murdered amidst the proscriptions of 673,
the picture of such a rural nobleman (-pater familias rusticanus-);
his wealth, estimated at 6,000,000 sesterces (60,000 pounds),
is mainly invested in his thirteen landed estates; he attends
to the management of it in person systematically and with enthusiasm;
he comes seldom or never to the capital, and, when he does appear there,
by his clownish manners he contrasts not less with the polished senator
than the innumerable hosts of his uncouth rural slaves
with the elegant train of domestic slaves in the capital.
Far more than the circles of the nobility with their cosmopolitan
culture and the mercantile class at home everywhere and nowhere,
these landlords and the "country towns" to which they essentially
gave tone (-municipia rusticana-) preserved as well the discipline
and manners as the pure and noble language of their fathers.
The order of landlords was regarded as the flower of the nation;
the speculator, who has made his fortune and wishes to appear among
the notables of the land, buys an estate and seeks, if not to become
himself the squire, at any rate to rear his son with that view.
We meet the traces of this class of landlords, wherever a national
movement appears in politics, and wherever literature puts forth
any fresh growth; from it the patriotic opposition to the new monarchy
drew its best strength; to it belonged Varro, Lucretius, Catullus;
and nowhere perhaps does the comparative freshness of this landlord-life
come more characteristically to light than in the graceful Arpinate
introduction to the second book of Cicero's treatise De Legibus--
a green oasis amidst the fearful desert of that equally empty
and volumin