confined themselves
to exhibiting a copy of the Helleno-Asiatic luxury still more
exaggerated and stupid than their model. Plutos naturally devours
his children as well as Kronos; the competition for all these
mostly worthless objects of fashionable longing so forced up prices,
that those who swam with the stream found the most colossal estate
melt away in a short time, and even those, who only for credit's sake
joined in what was most necessary, saw their inherited
and firmly- established wealth rapidly undermined. The canvass
for the consulship, for instance, was the usual highway to ruin
for houses of distinction; and nearly the same description applies
to the games, the great buildings, and all those other pleasant,
doubtless, but expensive pursuits. The princely wealth of that period
is only surpassed by its still more princely liabilities;
Caesar owed about 692, after deducting his assets, 25,000,000 sesterces
(250,000 pounds); Marcus Antonius, at the age of twenty-four
6,000,000 sesterces (60,000 pounds), fourteen years afterwards
40,000,000 (400,000 pounds); Curio owed 60,000,000 (600,000 pounds);
Milo 70,000,000 (700,000 pounds). That those extravagant habits
of the Roman world of quality rested throughout on credit,
is shown by the fact that the monthly interest in Rome was once
suddenly raised from four to eight per cent, through the borrowing
of the different competitors for the consulship. Insolvency,
instead of leading in due time to a meeting of creditors
or at any rate to a liquidation which might at least place matters
once more on a clear footing, was ordinarily prolonged
by the debtor as much as possible; instead of selling his property
and especially his landed estates, he continued to borrow
and to present the semblance of riches, till the crash only became
the worse and the winding-up yielded a result like that of Milo,
in which the creditors obtained somewhat above four per cent
of the sums for which they ranked. Amidst this startlingly rapid
transition from riches to bankruptcy and this systematic swindling,
nobody of course gained so much as the cool banker, who knew how to give
and refuse credit. The relations of debtor and creditor thus returned
almost to the same point at which they had stood in the worst times
of the social crises of the fifth century; the nominal landowners
held virtually by sufferance of their creditors; the debtors were either
in servile subjection to their credit