e. to leave the Stock Exchange in disgrace, if Caesar had not come
to his rescue by placing large sums at his disposal.
What Rabirius did was simply to gamble on a gigantic scale, and get
others to gamble with him. The luck turned against him, and he came
utterly to grief. There seems indeed to have been a perfect passion
for dealing with money in this wild way among the men of wealth and
influence; it was the fancy of the hour, and no disgrace attached to
it if a man could escape ruin. Thus the vast capital accumulated--the
sources of which were almost entirely in the provinces and the
kingdoms on the frontiers--was hardly ever used productively. It never
returned to the region whence it came, to be used in developing
its resources; the idea of using it even in Italy for industrial
undertakings was absent from the mind of the gambler. Those numberless
villas, of which we shall speak in another chapter, were homes of
luxury and magnificence, not centres of agricultural industry. There
are indeed some signs that in this very generation the revival of
Italian agriculture was beginning, and more especially the cultivation
of the olive and the vine; Varro, some twenty years later, could claim
that Italy was the best cultivated country in the world.
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