ous writer.

The Poor

But the cultivated class of merchants and the vigorous order
of landlords were far overgrown by the two classes that gave
tone to society--the mass of beggars, and the world of quality proper.
We have no statistical figures to indicate precisely the relative
proportions of poverty and riches for this epoch; yet we may
here perhaps again recall the expression which a Roman statesman
employed some fifty years before(52)--that the number of families
of firmly-established riches among the Roman burgesses did not
amount to 2000. The burgess-body had since then become different;
but clear indications attest that the disproportion between
poor and rich had remained at least as great. The increasing
impoverishment of the multitude shows itself only too plainly
in their crowding to the corn-largesses and to enlistment in the army;
the corresponding increase of riches is attested expressly
by an author of this generation, when, speaking of the circumstances
of the Marian period, he describes an estate of 2,000,000 sesterces
(20,000 pounds) as "riches according to the circumstances
of that day"; and the statements which we find as to the property
of individuals lead to the same conclusion. The very rich
Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus promised to twenty thousand soldiers
four -iugera- of land each, out of his own property; the estate
of Pompeius amounted to 70,000,000 sesterces (700,000 pounds);
that of Aesopus the actor to 20,000,000 (200,000 pounds); Marcus Crassus,
the richest of the rich, possessed at the outset of his career,
7,000,000 (70,000 pounds), at its close, after lavishing enormous
sums on the people, 170,000,000 sesterces (1,700,000 pounds).
The effect of such poverty and such riches was on both sides
an economic and moral disorganization outwardly different, but at bottom
of the same character. If the common man was saved from starvation
only by support from the resources of the state, it was the necessary
consequence of this mendicant misery--although it also reciprocally
appears as a cause of it--that he addicted himself to the beggar's
laziness and to the beggar's good cheer. The Roman plebeian
was fonder of gazing in the theatre than of working; the taverns
and brothels were so frequented, that the demagogues found their
special account in gaining the possessors of such establishments
over to their interests. The gladiatorial games--which revealed,
at the same time that they foster