r from enviable, and was throughout less
favourable than that of slaves in Greece; but, if we leave out of
account the classes last mentioned, the industrial slaves found their
position on the whole more tolerable than the rural serfs. They had
more frequently a family and a practically independent household, with
no remote prospect of obtaining freedom and property of their own.
Hence such positions formed the true training school of those upstarts
from the servile class, who by menial virtues and often by menial
vices rose to the rank of Roman citizens and not seldom attained
great prosperity, and who morally, economically, and politically
contributed at least as much as the slaves themselves to the ruin
of the Roman commonwealth.

Extent of Roman Mercantile Transactions
Coins and Moneys

The Roman mercantile transactions of this period fully kept pace with
the contemporary development of political power, and were no less
grand of their kind. Any one who wishes to have a clear idea of the
activity of the traffic with other lands, needs only to look into the
literature, more especially the comedies, of this period, in which the
Phoenician merchant is brought on the stage speaking Phoenician, and
the dialogue swarms with Greek and half Greek words and phrases.
But the extent and zealous prosecution of Roman business-dealings may
be traced most distinctly by means of coins and monetary relations.
The Roman denarius quite kept pace with the Roman legions. We have
already mentioned(19) that the Sicilian mints--last of all that of
Syracuse in 542--were closed or at any rate restricted to small money
in consequence of the Roman conquest, and that in Sicily and Sardinia
the -denarius- obtained legal circulation at least side by side with
the older silver currency and probably very soon became the exclusive
legal tender. With equal if not greater rapidity the Roman silver
coinage penetrated into Spain, where the great silver-mines existed
and there was virtually no earlier national coinage; at a very
early period the Spanish towns even began to coin after the Roman
standard.(20) On the whole, as Carthage coined only to a very limited
extent,(21) there existed not a single important mint in addition to
that of Rome in the region of the western Mediterranean, with the
exception of that of Massilia and perhaps also those of the Illyrian
Greeks in Apollonia and Dyrrhachium. Accordingly, when the Romans
began to establish