Rome was sadly in need of Christianity when these great doctrines which gave new values to life were first preached. An intense selfishness combined with utter disregard for others had come to the Roman people just in proportion as their city became the centre of the world of the time. The more one knows of the intimate details of the social life of this 1st century, the more the need of Christianity is recognized. Until recently, history has to a great extent been limited to the story of the wars and politics of older periods, and we have failed to know the people. With the develop ment of social history, this Roman chapter of the 1st and 2d centuries bears a striking resem blance to the history of other periods when a high degree of civilization, so-called, followed wealth and luxury. The all-important thing in the Rome of the 1st century was to make money. A number of men became immensely wealthy. Some five ways of making large fortunes at this time have been enumerated. The first was by insurance, and speculation in connection with it, for the Rome of the period was rather flimsily built, the people living, or rather sleeping, for they lived mainly out of doors, in rather confined quarters in apartment houses of five or more stories which, according to law, had to be built with streets all round them, and were therefore called insider (islands). The second was by speculation. It is said that Cicero himself the attorney of the abig interests) of his time at Rome, lost his fortune several times because of his tendency to speculate. The Forum was full of brokers' offices, and foreign exchange, because of the many different kinds of money current in the Empire, was a favorite object of speculation. The third way of making money was by cor nering foodstuffs and selling them dear. Rome was a very large city of some two million inhabitants which had grown up in a few generations and had to be fed from a distance, the grain crops being grown down on the North African coast. This facilitated food hoarding and profiteering. The fourth way of making money was by speculation in land. Rome grew rapidly out over the estates sur rounding it, and these were split up into parcels and sold at great profit. The fifth way was
by corruption in politics, usually not in Rome itself, but out in the provinces and by the farming of taxes, and other abuses. There are surprising similarities with later times in all this.
The money having been made very much as in our day, it was spent largely as our genera tion spends. Wealthy Romans had a home in the city, but spent comparatively little time in it, for they had a villa down near Naples, where they passed the winter months, a house at the seashore for the summer; some of them went up to Lake Como near the foothills of the Alps for the early fall, and only appeared in Rome for a brief fashionable winter season. They ate 12 and 15 course dinners, taking Roman punch, made from snow brought down from the Alps, about the middle of the dinner so as to drive away the blood from the stomach for the moment and then have it come back by a re action which produced a renewal of appetite. They affected all sorts of delicacies brought from long distances, indulged in the pleasures of the table, and dreading indigestion very much, sometimes relieved their stomachs after a heavy dinner by tickling their throats, and then went back to eat a more simple meal. Their pleasures were the baths and the amphitheatre. Here they saw gladiators fight with each other to the death, or with wild animals at great risk and sometimes fatal results, or saw wild animals kill each other. It is said that the luxurious Romans received an especially poignant pleasure from seeing the Christians thrown to the lions. They had not become savages but were only wealthy sybarites think ing but of themselves and referring everything to their own feelings regardless of others. Divorces became extremely common and could be secured for even trivial reasons, children grew to be fewer in the families; the men lost courage and the women lost virtue and the beginning of the end of Rome was very clear. There were to be periods as under the Spanish Caesars, which began just as the 1st century closed when degeneration and decadence seemed to be held up for a time, but the seeds of dissolution had been sown and Rome's destiny was upon her.