We must now turn to the other department of the activity of the men of business, that of banking and money-lending (negotiatores).
On the north or sunny side of the Forum we noticed in our walk round the city the shops of the bankers (tabernae argentariae). The argentarii were originally, as their name suggests, only money-changers, a class of small business men that arose in response to a need felt as soon as increasing commerce and extended empire brought foreign coin in large quantities to Rome. The Italian communities outside the Roman State issued their own coinage until they were admitted to the civitas after the Social War,—a fact which alone is sufficient to show the need of men who made it their business to know the current value of various coins in Roman money; and as Rome became involved in the affairs of the East, there were always circulating in the city the tetradrachms of Antioch and Alexandria, the Rhodian drachmas, and the cistophori of the kings of Pergamus, afterwards coined in the province of Asia.[127] No doubt the money-changing business was a profitable one, and itself led to the formation of capital which could be used in taking deposits and making advances; and, as Professor Purser puts it,[128] the mere possession of a quantity of coin for purposes of change would be likely to develop spontaneously the profession of banking. In the same way the nummularii, or assayers of the coin, having a mass of it in their hands, would tend to develop a private business as well as their official public one. All these, argentarii or nummularii, might be called foeneratores, from the interest (foenus) which they charged in their transactions. The profession was a respectable one, for honesty and exactness in accounts were absolutely necessary to success in it.[129] If the reader will turn to Cicero's speech in defence of Caecina (6. 16), he will find these accounts appealed to, though apparently not actually produced in court; but in the Noctes Atticae of Aulus Gellius (xiv. 2) a judge who is describing a civil case which came before him, mentions, among the documents produced, mensae rationes, i.e. the accounts kept by the banker.
Your argentarius seems to have been ready to undertake for you almost all that a modern banker will do for his customer. He would take deposits of money, either for the depositor's use or to bear interest, and would make payments on his behalf on receipt of a written order, answering to our cheque;[130] this was a practice probably introduced from Greece, for in the Eastern Mediterranean the whole business of credit and exchange had long been reduced to a system. Again, if you wished to be supplied with money during a journey, or to pay a sum to any one at a distance, e.g. in Greece or Asia, your argentarius would arrange it for you by giving you letters of credit or bills of exchange on a banker at such towns as you might mention, and so save you the trouble of carrying a heavy weight of coin with you. When, Cicero sent his son to the University of Athens, he wished to give him a generous allowance,—too generous, as we should think, for it amounted to about £640 a year,—and he asked Atticus whether it could be managed for him by permutatio, i.e. exchange, and received an affirmative answer[131]. So too when his beloved freedman secretary Tiro fell ill of fever at Patrae, Cicero finds it easy to get a local banker there to advance him all the money he needed, and to pay the doctor, engaging himself to repay the money to any agent whom the banker might name[132].
Your argentarius would also attend for you, or appoint an agent to attend, at any public auction in which you were interested as seller or purchaser, and would pay or receive the money for you,—a practice which must have greatly helped him in getting to know the current value of all kinds of property, and indeed in learning to understand human nature on its business side. In the passage from the pro Caecina quoted just now, a lady, Caesennia, wished to buy an estate; she employs an agent, Aebutius, no doubt recommended by her banker, and to him the estate is knocked down. He undertakes that the argentarius of the vendor, who is present at the auction, shall be paid the value, and this is ultimately done by Caesennia, and the sum entered in the banker's books (tabulae).
But perhaps the most important part of the business was the finding money for those who were in want of it, i.e. making advances on interest. The poor man who was in need of ready money could get it from the argentarius in coin if he had any security to offer, and, as we saw in the last chapter, might get entangled more and more hopelessly in the nets of the money-lender. Whether the same argentarius did this small business and also the work of supplying the rich man with credit, we do not know; it may have been the case that the great money-lenders like Atticus themselves employed argentarii, and so kept them going. That Atticus would undertake, anyhow, for a friend like Cicero, any amount of money-finding, we know well from many letters of Cicero, written when he was anxious to buy a piece of land at any cost on which to erect a shrine to his beloved daughter[133]; and we may be pretty sure that Atticus could not have done all that Cicero importunately pressed upon him if he had not had a number of useful professional agents at command. From these same letters we also learn that finding money by no means necessarily meant finding coin; in a society where every one was lending or borrowing, and probably doing both at the same time, what actually passed was chiefly securities, mortgages, debts, and so on. If you wanted to hand over a hundred thousand or so to a creditor, what your agent had as often as not to do was to persuade that creditor to accept as payment the debts owing to yourself from others, i.e. you would hand over to him, if he would accept them, the bonds or other securities given you by your own debtors.[134]
It is plain then that the money-lenders had an enormous business, even in Rome alone, and risky as it undoubtedly was, it must often have been a profitable one. And it was not only at Rome that men were borrowing and lending, but over the whole Empire. For reasons which it would need an economic treatise to explain, private men, cities, and even kings were in want of money; it was needed to meet the increased cost of living and the constantly increasing standard of living among the educated;[135] it was needed by the cities of Greece and the East to repair the damages done in the wars of the last three hundred years; it was needed by the poorer provincials to pay the taxes for which neither the publicani nor the Roman government could afford to wait; and it was needed by the kings who had come within the dismal shadow of the Roman Empire, in order to carry on their own government, or to satisfy the demands of the neighbouring provincial governor, or to bribe the ruling men at Rome to get some decree passed in their favour. Cicero, at the end of his life, looking back to his own consulship in 63, says that at no time in his recollection was the whole world in such a condition of indebtedness,[136] and in a famous passage in his second Catilinarian oration he has drawn a picture of the various classes of debtors in Rome and Italy at that time (Cat. ii. § 18 foll.). He tells us of those who have wealth and yet will not pay their debts; of those who are in debt and look to a revolution to absolve them; of the veterans of the Sullan army, settled in colonies such as Faesulae, who had rushed into debt in order to live luxurious lives; of old debtors of the city, getting deeper and deeper into the quagmire, who joined the conspiracy as a last desperate venture. There was in fact in that famous year a real social fermentation going on, caused by economic disturbance of the most serious kind; the germs of the disease can be traced back to the Hannibalic war and its effects on Italy, but all the symptoms had been continually exacerbated by the negligence and ignorance of the government, and brought to a head by the Social and Civil Wars in 90-82 B.C. In 63 the State escaped an economic catastrophe through the vigilance of Cicero and the alliance of the respectable classes under his leadership. In 49, and again in 48, it escaped a similar disaster through the good sense of Caesar and his agents, who succeeded in steering between Scylla and Charybdis by saving the debtors without ruining the lenders.[137]
Wonderful figures are given by later writers, such as Plutarch, of the debts and loans of the great men of this time, and they may stand as giving us a general impression of private financial recklessness. But the only authentic information that has come down to us is what Cicero drops from time to time in his correspondence about his own affairs,[138] and even this needs much explanation which we are unable to apply to it. What is certain is that Cicero never had more than a very moderate income on which he could depend, and that at times he was hard up for money, especially of course after his exile and the confiscation of his property; and that on the other hand he never had any difficulty in getting the sums he needed, and never shows the smallest real anxiety about his finances. His profession as a barrister only brought him a return indirectly in the form of an occasional legacy or gift, since fees were forbidden by a lex Cincia; his books could hardly have paid him, at least in the form of money; his inherited property was small, and his Italian villas were not profitable farms, nor was it the practice to let such country houses, as we do now, when not occupying them; he declined a provincial government, the usual source of wealth, and when at last compelled to undertake one, only realised what was then a paltry sum,—some £17,500, all of which, while in deposit at Ephesus, was seized by the Pompeians in the Civil War.[139] Yet even early in life he could afford the necessary expenses for election to successive magistracies, and could live in the style demanded of an important public man. Immediately after his consulship he paid £28,000 for Crassus' house on the Palatine, and it is here that we first discover how he managed such financial operations. Here are his own words in a letter to a friend of December 62 B.C.:[140] "I have bought the house for 3,500 sestertia … so you may now look on me as so deeply in debt as to be eager to join a conspiracy if any one would admit me! … Money is plentiful at 6 per cent, and the success of my measures (in the consulship) has caused me to be regarded as a good security."
The simple fact was that Cicero was always regarded as a safe man to lend money to, by the business men and the great capitalists; partly because he was an honest man,—a vir bonus who would never dream of repudiation or bankruptcy; partly because he knew every one, and had a hundred wealthy friends besides the lender of the moment and among them, most faithful of all, the prudent and indefatigable Atticus. Undoubtedly then it was by borrowing, and regularly paying interest on the loans, that he raised money whenever he wanted it. He may have occasionally made money in the companies of tax-collectors; we have seen that he probably had shares in some of their ventures. But there is no clear evidence in his letters of this source of wealth,[141] and there is abundant evidence of the borrowing. After his return from exile, though the senate had given him somewhat meagre compensation for the loss of his property, he began at once to borrow and to build: "I am building in three places," he writes to his brother,[142] "and am patching up my other houses. I live somewhat more lavishly than I used to do; I am obliged to do so." Here again we know from whom he borrowed,—it was this same brother, who of course had no more certain income than his own, probably less. But he had been governor of Asia for three years (61-58 B.C.), and must have realised large sums even in that exhausted province; and at this moment he was legatus to Pompeius as special commissioner for organising the supply of corn, and thus was in immediate contact with one of the greatest millionaires of the day. In order to repay his brother all Marcus had to do was to borrow from other friends. "In regard to money I am crippled. But the liberality of my brother I have repaid, in spite of his protests, by the aid of my friends, that I might not be drained quite dry myself" (ad Att. iv. 3). Two years later an unwary reader might feel some astonishment at finding that Quintus himself was now deep in debt;[143] but as he continues to read the correspondence his astonishment will vanish. With the prospect before him of a prolonged stay in Gaul with Caesar, Quintus might doubtless have borrowed to any extent; and in fact with Caesar's help—the proceeds of the Gallic wars—both brothers found themselves in opulence. The Civil War, and the repayment of his debts to Caesar, nearly ruined Marcus towards the end of his life, but nothing prevented his contriving to find money for any object on which he had set his heart; when in his grief for the loss of his daughter he wishes to buy suburban gardens where a shrine to her memory may (strange to say) attract public notice, he tells Atticus to buy what is necessary at any cost. "Manage the business your own way; do not consider what my purse demands—about that I care nothing—but what I want."[144]
Such being the financial method of Cicero and his brother, we cannot be surprised to find that the younger generation of the family followed faithfully in the footsteps of their elders. We have seen that the young Marcus had a large allowance at Athens and on the whole he seems to have kept fairly well within it, in spite of some trouble; but his cousin the younger Quintus, coming to see his uncle in December 45, showed him a gloomy countenance, and on being asked the meaning of it, said that he was going with Caesar to the Parthian war in order to avoid his creditors, and presumably to make money to pay them with.[145] He had not even enough money for the journey out. His uncle did not offer to give him any, but he does not seem to have thought very seriously of the young man's embarrassments.
One more example of the financial dealings of the business men of this extraordinary age, and we will bring this chapter to an end. It is a story which has luckily been preserved in Cicero's speech in defence of a certain Rabirius Postumus in the year 54, who was accused under Caesar's law de pecuniis repetundis (extortion in the provinces). It is a remarkable revelation of all the most striking methods of making and using money in the last years of the Republic.