The income of the average senator in the fourth century A.D. was about £60,000, a very large sum when money was not as plentiful as it is to-day. Aurelius Symmachus, a young senator typical of this time, possessed no less than fifteen country seats, besides large estates in different parts of Italy and three town houses in Rome or her suburbs. It was his object to become Praetor of Rome, one of the highest offices in the city; and in order to gain popularity he and his father organized public games that cost them some £90,000. Lions and crocodiles were fetched from Africa, dogs from Scotland, a special breed of horses from Spain; while captured warriors were brought from Germany, whom he destined to fight with one another in the arena. The life of this young senator, according to his letters, was controlled by purely selfish considerations. He did not want the praetorship in order to be of use to the Empire, but merely that the Empire might crown his career with a coveted honour. The same narrow outlook and lack of public spirit was common to the majority of the other men and women of his class, and so great was their blindness that they could not even see that they were undermining Rome’s power, far less avail to save her. More fatal even than the corruption of the aristocracy was the decline of the middle classes, usually called the backbone of a nation’s greatness. ‘The name of Roman citizen,’ says a native of Marseilles in the fifth century, ‘formerly so highly valued and even bought with a great price, is now ... shunned, nay it is regarded with abomination.’ [Sidenote: Taxation under the Roman Empire] This change from the days of St. Paul may be traced back long before the time when Symmachus wasted his patrimony in bringing crocodiles from Africa and horses from Spain. Its cause was the gradual but constant increase of taxation required to fill the imperial treasury, and the unequal scale according to which such taxation was levied. Rome’s main source of revenue was an impost on land, and ought by rights to have been exacted from the senatorial class that owned the majority of the large estates. Unfortunately, it was left to the local municipal councils, the _curias_, to collect this tax, and if it fell short of the amount required from the locality by the imperial treasury, the _curiales_, or class compelled as a duty to attend the councils, were held responsible for the deficit. Here was a problem for Roman citizens of medium wealth, members of their _curia_ by birth, quite unable to divest themselves of this more than doubtful honour, and conscious that their sons at eighteen must also accept the dignity and put their shoulders to the burden. It was one thing to assess the chief landlords of the neighbourhood at a sum that matched their revenues, it was another to obtain the money from them. In England to-day the man who refuses to pay his taxes is punished; in imperial Rome it was the tax-collector.