The poor man who was in need of ready money could get it from the argentarius in coin if he had any security to offer, and, as we saw in the last chapter, might get entangled more and more hopelessly in the nets of the money-lender.

Whether the same argentarius did this small business and also the work of supplying the rich man with credit, we do not know; it may have been the case that the great money-lenders like Atticus themselves employed argentarii, and so kept them going.

That Atticus would undertake, anyhow, for a friend like Cicero, any amount of money-finding, we know well from many letters of Cicero, written when he was anxious to buy a piece of land at any cost on which to erect a shrine to his beloved daughter[133]; and we may be pretty sure that Atticus could not have done all that Cicero importunately pressed upon him if he had not had a number of useful professional agents at command.

From these same letters we also learn that finding money by no means necessarily meant finding coin; in a society where every one was lending or borrowing, and probably doing both at the same time, what actually passed was chiefly securities, mortgages, debts, and so on.

If you wanted to hand over a hundred thousand or so to a creditor, what your agent had as often as not to do was to persuade that creditor to accept as payment the debts owing to yourself from others, i.e.you would hand over to him, if he would accept them, the bonds or other securities given you by your own debtors.[134] It is plain then that the money-lenders had an enormous business, even in Rome alone, and risky as it undoubtedly was, it must often have been a profitable one.