on a par with Cato in purity. To lend money to citizens, or more
profitably to allied States and cities, at enormous rates of interest,
was the ordinary resource of a Roman nobleman in quest of revenue. The
allied city, when absolutely eaten to the bone by one noble Roman,
who had plundered it as Proconsul or Governor, would escape from its
immediate embarrassment by borrowing money from another noble Roman,
who would then grind its very bones in exacting his interest and his
principal. Cicero, in the most perfect of his works--the treatise De
Officiis, an essay in which he instructs his son as to the way in
which a man should endeavor to live so as to be a gentleman--inveighs
both against trade and usury. When he tells us that they are to be
accounted mean who buy in order that they may sell, we, with our later
lights, do not quite agree with him, although he founds his assertion
on an idea which is too often supported by the world's practice,
namely, that men cannot do a retail business profitably without
lying.[79] The doctrine, however, has always been common that retail
trade is not compatible with noble bearing, and was practised by all
Romans who aspired to be considered among the upper classes. That
other and certainly baser means of making money by usury was, however,
only too common. Crassus, the noted rich man of Rome in Caesar's day,
who was one of the first Triumvirate, and who perished ignominiously
in Parthia, was known to have gathered much of his wealth by such
means. But against this Cicero is as staunchly severe as against
shopkeeping. "First of all," he says, "these profits are despicable
which incur the hatred of men, such as those of gatherers of custom
and lenders of money on usury."[80]

Again, we are entitled to say that Cicero did not condescend to enrich
himself by the means which he himself condemns, because, had he done
so, the accusations made against him by his contemporaries would have