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
their patrons' doors for the pittance which formed their daily dole.
(Sat i. 101.)]
[Footnote 15: See Juv. _Sat_. iii. 62. Scipio, on being interrupted by
the mob in the Forum, exclaimed,--"Silence, ye stepsons of Italy! What!
shall I fear these fellows now they are free, whom I myself have brought
in chains to Rome?" (See Cic.
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