"He sprang from an origin not merely humble but sordid: his father was a butcher, who sold his own meat, and employed his son in this slavish business." The story may not be true, and indeed it is not a very probable one, but it well represents the inherited feeling towards retail trade of the Roman of the higher classes of society,--a feeling so tenacious of life, that even in modern England, where it arose from much the same causes as in the ancient world, it has only within the last century begun to die out.[73] Yet in Rome these humble workers existed and made a living for themselves from the very beginning, as far as we can guess, of real city life.

They are the necessary and inevitable product of the growth of a town population, and of the resulting division of labour.

The following passage from a work on industrial organisation in England may be taken as closely representing the same process in early Rome:[74] "The town arose as a centre in which the surplus produce of many villages could be profitably disposed of by exchange.

Trade thus became a settled occupation, and trade prepared the way for the establishment of the handicrafts, by furnishing capital for the support of the craftsmen, and by creating a regular market for their products.

It was possible for a great many bodies of craftsmen,--the weavers, tailors, butchers, bakers, etc., to find a livelihood, each craft devoting itself to the supply of a single branch of those wants which the village household had attempted very imperfectly to satisfy by its own labours." As in mediaeval Europe, so in early Rome, the same conditions produced the same results: we find the craftsmen of the town forming themselves into _gilds_, not only for the protection of their trade, but from a natural instinct of association, and providing these gilds, on the model of the older groups of family and gens, with a religious centre and a patron deity.