[Sidenote: Neglect and decline of commerce, and sufferings of the people.] But while a new life was being gradually infused into the empire by the creation of Constantinople, overgrown wealth and luxury, with the evils following in their train, indolence, waste, and extravagance, were only too surely working out the downfall of old Rome. Capital, which ought to have been used as a provision for fresh channels of employment for an increasing population, was devoted to pleasure and folly; while no middle class arose to create fresh capital by its industry and to supply the place of the annual waste. In no age or country have the extremes of wealth and poverty been so great; even the provincial merchants came not to the capital to increase its wealth, but rather to waste their own substance. They sought to rival, in display, the ancient noblesse; they rented their palaces to enjoy their society, and were ready to spend fortunes derived from commerce to win a ready entrance into their salons. So early as the Augustan age, Livy and Pliny have alluded to the then enormous accumulation of wealth in Rome; the former describing the mass of treasure accumulated there as something fabulous;[341] the latter stating that there were side-boards in his time groaning under more solid silver than had been transported by Scipio from vanquished Carthage. Besides all this removable wealth in the shape of plate, there was, no doubt, a still greater supply in jewels and precious stones, in gold ornaments and in the current metallic coin of the empire. Unlike their poor and invincible ancestors, who were not distinguished from the meanest of the soldiers by the delicacy of their food or the splendour of their apparel, the nobles of Rome, in its latter days, were not merely fond of the most ostentatious display, but magnified the rent rolls of their estates, too frequently living in accordance with their imaginary rather than with their actual incomes. The “Satires” of Juvenal portray but too distinctly the corruption of manners which had in his time (the reign of Domitian) extended to the female portion of the population.[342] History, it has been truly said, repeats itself; and the reading of the lengthened description Ammianus has given of the extravagance of Rome reminds us of too many of the gay assemblies so frequently met with in our own time. Nor is his description of the manners of the Roman nobility wholly unlike what may too frequently be now seen in the conduct of those persons who measure their importance by their wealth and gay equipages, or who, by their rapid acquisition of large fortunes, and their method of dealing with them, used to be known in England as “Nabobs,” but who now bear a less flattering name.