This exists mainly in the Trans-Tiber district under the shadow of the Janiculum, although Jews are allowed to settle and to do business in any section of the city. The total number of free Jews in Rome has been set at 35,000 in Augustus’s day, and it received a great reinforcement through the captives of Titus, many of whom regained their liberty. The Jews are obliged to pay to the Capitoline Jupiter that tribute which they formerly paid to their Temple in Jerusalem, but otherwise they are not harassed by the government. For the most part, however, they are very poor; few of them are great bankers or merchants, but nearly all the rest are petty shopkeepers and peddlers--also a great many are alleged to increase their living by fortune-telling and by like dubious arts. =124. The Roman Plebeians, the “Mob” (_Vulgus_).=--Greatly surpassing the resident aliens in number are inevitably the ordinary Roman plebeians. It is a fine thing in the provinces to boast, “_Civis Romanus sum_,” but in the capital many a freedman, many an upper-slave of a magnate even, looks down with scorn on a large fraction of this “common herd” (_grex_) that still claims to form “the Roman People.” However, if you are really a Roman citizen entitled to wear a toga, and to share in the grain doles and other public distributions, you can really live on very little. Somehow you must find means for the rental of a sleeping garret in an insula, but the daytime you can spend hanging around the fora, porticoes, or the entrances to the circuses and gladiator schools, playing _morra_ and checkergames (see p. 205); idling in the great public baths; frequenting every possible public exhibition in the theater or amphitheater and often getting a bare income by toadying most abjectly to the rich. Everybody despises this Roman “mob,” and yet cringes to it. Its yells across the circus send the blood from the cheeks of very tyrannous emperors. The mild Italian climate renders an existence amid dirt and sunshine, eked out by very little labor, decidedly tolerable.[67] Assuredly very many of these “citizens” are simply honest thrifty industrialists, trades people, or professional men, holding their own stubbornly against the competing slaves, freedmen, and aliens. Nevertheless, the proportion of undesirables is dangerously great. Many of the idle plebeians are the sons of freedmen, who have inherited their parents’ non-Italian vices but who have not been under their necessity of hard work and faithfulness; and when one examines the moral and social qualities of the alleged heirs of the virtuous old-time plebeians the idea of “restoring the Republic,” still sighed after by a few aristocratic philosophers, appears absolutely laughable.[68]