96 THE VICES AND VIRTUES OF ROME 



the adulterer to death ; and the first Emperor drove 

 his beloved daughter into exile for life for that trans- 

 gression alone, while the fourth Empress only saved 

 herself by suicide from a worse fate. 



Meantime the power and wealth of Rome had become 

 enormous. The city of Rome came to have a million 

 inhabitants ; the Empire a hundred million. Wealth, 

 as in all such developments, came to be distributed 

 with cruel inequality. The patricians lived in superb 

 mansions on the hills, while the people crowded into 

 dense and poor tenements in the valleys. Even here, 

 however, current ideas are materially wrong, and Mr. 

 Wells gives an extraordinarily wrong impression of 

 the condition of the people. The descriptions we 

 have of the luxury of the rich are misleading to the 

 modern mind. Many people have the idea that there 

 were wealthier capitalists in Rome than had ever been 

 before or have ever been since. As a matter of fact, 

 our experts who have worked out the fortunes of these 

 Roman capitalists in modern terms find that the 

 richest of them were far less wealthy than scores of 

 our modern capitalists. Rockefeller could have bought 

 up the whole of them in any particular generation, 

 and there are a dozen British capitalists any one of 

 whom could have bought up any half-dozen Roman 

 capitalists. 



At the other end of the scale was, not the prole- 

 tariat, but the vast army of slaves. In mitigation of 

 this grave blot on the Roman civilization one can 

 only say that it was young. It inherited a tradition 

 from the whole civilized world that prisoners taken 

 in war might be enslaved, and it takes ages to uproot 

 a tradition that is at once ancient, world-wide, and 

 very profitable. The modern worker is apt to forget 



