profit by his sale.[108] Yet such methods must have been regarded by the nobility as a whole as merely subsidiary means of increasing their patrimony: and, in spite of the fact that Cato took the view that agriculture should be an amusement rather than a business,[109] there can be no doubt that the staple of the wealth of the official class was still to be found in the acres of Italy. It was not, however, the wealth of the moderate homestead which was to be won from a careful tillage of the fields; it was the wealth which, as we shall soon see, was associated with the slave-capitalist, the overseer, a foreign method of cultivation on the model of the grand plantation-systems of the East, and a belief in the superior value of pasturage to tillage which was to turn many a populous and fertile plain into a wilderness of danger and desolation. But, strive as he would, there was many a nobleman who found that his expenditure could not be met by dabbling in trade where others plunged, or by the revenues yielded by the large tracts of Italian soil over which he claimed exclusive powers. The playwright of the age has figured Indigence as the daughter of Luxury;[110] and a still more terrible child was to be born in the Avarice which sprang from the useless cravings and fierce competitions of the time.[111] The desire to get and to hold had ever been a Roman vice; but, it had also been the unvarying assumption of the Roman State, and the conviction of the Roman official--a conviction so deeply seated and spontaneous as to form no ground for self-congratulation that the lust for acquisition should limit itself to the domain of private right, and never cross the rigid barrier which divided that domain from the sphere of wealth and power which the city had committed to its servant as a solemn trust. The better sort of overseer was often found in the crabbed man of business--a Cato, for example--who would never waive a right of his own and protected those of his dependants with similar tenacity and passion. The honour which prevailed in the commercial code at home was considered so much a matter of course in all dealings with the foreign world, that the State scorned to scrutinise the expenditure of its ministers and was spared the disgrace of a system of public audit. Even in this age, which is regarded by the ancient historians as marking the beginning of the decline in public virtue, Polybius could contrast the attitude of suspicion towards the guardians of the State, which was the characteristic of the official life of his own unhappy country, with the well-founded confidence which Rome reposed in the honour of her ministers, and could tell the world that "if but a talent of money were entrusted to a magistrate of a Greek state, ten auditors, as many seals and twice as many witnesses are required for the security of the bond; yet even so faith is not observed; while the Roman in an official or