One reads with silent astonishment of the sums expended by wealthy Romans on their magnificence or their pleasures.

And as commerce was considered derogatory to rank and position, and was therefore pursued by men who had no character to lose, these overgrown fortunes were often acquired by wretches of the meanest stamp--by slaves brought from over the sea, who had to conceal the holes bored in their ears;[10] or even by malefactors who had to obliterate, by artificial means, the three letters[11] which had been branded by the executioner on their foreheads.

But many of the richest men in Rome, who had not sprung from this convict origin, were fully as well deserving of the same disgraceful stigma.

Their houses were built, their coffers were replenished, from the drained resources of exhausted provincials.

Every young man of active ambition or noble birth, whose resources had been impoverished by debauchery and extravagance, had but to borrow fresh sums in order to give magnificent gladiatorial shows, and then, if he could once obtain an aedileship, and mount to the higher offices of the State, he would in time become the procurator or proconsul of a province, which he might pillage almost at his will.