Each of these "gorgeous criminals" lived in the midst of an humble
crowd of flatterers, parasites, clients, dependents, and slaves. Among
the throng that at early morning jostled each other in the marble
_atrium_ were to be found a motley and hetrogeneous set of men. Slaves
of every age and nation--Germans, Egyptians, Gauls, Goths, Syrians,
Britons, Moors, pampered and consequential freedmen, impudent
confidential servants, greedy buffoons, who lived by making bad jokes at
other people's tables; Dacian gladiators, with whom fighting was a
trade; philosophers, whose chief claim to reputation was the length of
their beards; supple Greeklings of the Tartuffe species, ready to
flatter and lie with consummate skill, and spreading their vile
character like a pollution wherever they went: and among all these a
number of poor but honest clients, forced quietly to put up with a
thousand forms of contumely[14] and insult, and living in discontented
idleness on the _sportula_ or daily largesse which was administered by
the grudging liberality of their haughty patrons. The stout old Roman
burgher had well-nigh disappeared; the sturdy independence, the manly
self-reliance of an industrial population were all but unknown. The
insolent loungers who bawled in the Forum were often mere stepsons of
Italy, who had been dragged thither in chains,--the dregs of all
nations, which had flowed into Rome as into a common sewer,[15] bringing
with them no heritage except the specialty of their national vices.
Their two wants were bread and the shows of the circus; so long as the
_sportula_ of their patron, the occasional donative of an emperor, and
the ambition of political candidates supplied these wants, they lived in
contented abasement, anxious neither for liberty nor for power.

[Footnote 14: Few of the many sad pictures in the _Satires_ of Juvenal
are more pitiable than that of the wretched "Quirites" struggling at