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 creditors, so that the humbler of them appeared like freedmen in the creditor's train and those of higher rank spoke and voted even in the senate at the nod of their creditor-lord; or they were on the point of declaring war on property itself, and either of intimidating their creditors by threats or getting rid of them by conspiracy and civil war.

On these relations was based the power of Crassus; out of them arose the insurrections--whose motto was "a clear sheet"-of Cinna( 54) and still more definitely of Catilina, of Coelius, of Dolabella entirely resembling the battles between those who had and those who had not, which a century before agitated the Hellenic world.( 55) That amidst so rotten an economic condition every financial or political crisis should occasion the most dreadful confusion, was to be expected from the nature of the case; we need hardly mention that the usual phenomena--the disappearance of capital, the sudden depreciation of landed estates, innumerable bankruptcies, and an almost universal insolvency--made their appearance now during the civil war, just as they had done during the Social and Mithradatic wars.( 56) Immortality Under such circumstances, as a matter of course, morality and family life were treated as antiquated things among all ranks of society.

To be poor was not merely the sorest disgrace and the worst crime, but the only disgrace and the only crime: for money the statesman sold the state, and the burgess sold his freedom; the post of the officer and the vote of the juryman were to be had for money; for money the lady of quality surrendered her person as well as the common courtesan; falsifying of documents and perjuries had become so common that in a popular poet of this age an oath is called "the plaster for debts." Men had forgotten what honesty was; a person who refused a bribe was regarded not as an upright man, but as a personal foe.

The criminal statistics of all times and countries will hardly furnish a parallel to the dreadful picture of crimes--so varied, so horrible, and so unnatural--which the trial of Aulus Cluentius unrolls before us in the bosom of one of the most respected families of an Italian country town.
Friendship But while at the bottom of the national life the slime was thus constantly accumulating more and more deleteriously and deeply, so much the more smooth and glittering was the surface, overlaid with the varnish of polished manners and universal friendship.
All the world interchanged visits; so that in the houses of quality it was necessary to admit the persons presenting themselves every morning for the levee in a certain order fixed by the master or occasionally by the attendant in waiting, and to give audience only to the more notable one by one, while the rest were more summarily admitted partly in groups, partly en masse at the close--a distinction which Gaius Gracchus, in this too paving the way for the new monarchy, is said to have introduced.