ns in the price of bread-corn were of a fabulous
and incalculable description.(46) Lastly, the distribution of grain
formed an official invitation to the whole burgess-proletariate
who were destitute of food and indisposed for work to take up
their abode in the capital.

Anarchy of the Capital

The seed sown was bad, and the harvest corresponded. The system
of clubs and bands in the sphere of politics, the worship of Isis
and similar pious extravagances in that of religion, had their root
in this state of things. People were constantly in prospect
of a dearth, and not unfrequently in utter famine. Nowhere was a man
less secure of his life than in the capital; murder professionally
prosecuted by banditti was the single trade peculiar to it;
the alluring of the victim to Rome was the preliminary
to his assassination; no one ventured into the country
in the vicinity of the capital without an armed retinue.
Its outward condition corresponded to this inward disorganization,
and seemed a keen satire on the aristocratic government.
Nothing was done for the regulation of the stream of the Tiber;
excepting that they caused the only bridge, with which they still
made shift,(47) to be constructed of stone at least as far as
the Tiber-island. As little was anything done toward the levelling
of the city of the Seven Hills, except where perhaps the accumulation
of rubbish had effected some improvement. The streets ascended
and descended narrow and angular, and were wretchedly kept; the footpaths
were small and ill paved. The ordinary houses were built of bricks
negligently and to a giddy height, mostly by speculative builders
on account of the small proprietors; by which means the former
became vastly rich, and the latter were reduced to beggary.
Like isolated islands amidst this sea of wretched buildings
were seen the splendid palaces of the rich, which curtailed the space
for the smaller houses just as their owners curtailed the burgess-
rights of smaller men in the state, and beside whose marble pillars
and Greek statues the decaying temples, with their images of the gods
still in great part carved of wood, made a melancholy figure.
A police-supervision of streets, of river-banks, of fires, or of building
was almost unheard of; if the government troubled itself at all
about the inundations, conflagrations, and falls of houses
which were of yearly occurrence, it was only to ask from the state-
theologians their report an