agriculture should be an amusement rather than a business,[109] there
can be no doubt that the staple of the wealth of the official class was
still to be found in the acres of Italy. It was not, however, the wealth
of the moderate homestead which was to be won from a careful tillage of
the fields; it was the wealth which, as we shall soon see, was
associated with the slave-capitalist, the overseer, a foreign method of
cultivation on the model of the grand plantation-systems of the East,
and a belief in the superior value of pasturage to tillage which was to
turn many a populous and fertile plain into a wilderness of danger and
desolation.

But, strive as he would, there was many a nobleman who found that his
expenditure could not be met by dabbling in trade where others plunged,
or by the revenues yielded by the large tracts of Italian soil over
which he claimed exclusive powers. The playwright of the age has figured
Indigence as the daughter of Luxury;[110] and a still more terrible
child was to be born in the Avarice which sprang from the useless
cravings and fierce competitions of the time.[111] The desire to get and
to hold had ever been a Roman vice; but, it had also been the unvarying
assumption of the Roman State, and the conviction of the Roman
official--a conviction so deeply seated and spontaneous as to form no
ground for self-congratulation that the lust for acquisition should
limit itself to the domain of private right, and never cross the rigid
barrier which divided that domain from the sphere of wealth and power
which the city had committed to its servant as a solemn trust. The
better sort of overseer was often found in the crabbed man of
business--a Cato, for example--who would never waive a right of his own
and protected those of his dependants with similar tenacity and passion.
The honour which prevailed in the commercial code at home was considered
so much a matter of course in all dealings with the foreign world, that