dues of a port or undertake to cleanse a river-bed.(622) There is no room left in Rome for men who will not soil themselves with such sordid trades. Manifestly, if the satirist is not burlesquing the feeling of his class, there was plenty of room left for the vigorous freedman who could accept Vespasian’s motto that no gain is unsavoury.(623) But those men had not only commercial tact and ability, the wit to see where money was to be made by seizing new openings and unoccupied fields for enterprise; they had also among them men of great ambitions, men capable of great affairs. It required no common deftness, suppleness, and vigilant energy for an old slave to work his way upwards through the grades of the imperial chancery, to thread the maze of deadly intrigue, in the reigns of Claudius or Nero, and to emerge at last as master of the palace. Yet one of these freedmen ministers, when he died, had served ten emperors, six of whom had come to a violent end.(624) That a class so despised and depressed should rise to control the trade, and even the administration of the Empire, furnishes a presumption that they were needed, and that they were not unworthy of their destiny. Yet however inevitable, or even desirable, this great revolution may seem to the cool critic of the twentieth century, it is possible that, had he lived in the first, he might have denounced it as vigorously as Juvenal. The literary and artistic spirit, often living in a past golden age, and remotely detached from the movements going on around it, is prone to regard them with uneasy suspicion. It is moved by sacred sentiment, by memories and distant ideals, by fastidious taste, which expresses itself often with passionate hatred for what seems to it revolutionary sacrilege. It is also apt to fasten on the more grotesque and vulgar traits of any great popular movement, and to use a finished skill in making it ridiculous. It was in this way that literature treated the freedmen. They had many gross and palpable faults; they were old slaves and Orientals; as they rose in the world they were eager for money, and they got it; they were, many of them, naturally vulgar, and they paraded their new wealth with execrable taste, and trampled on better, though poorer, men than themselves, Juvenal and Martial, by birth and associations, have little in common with that accomplished exquisite of the Neronian circle who has painted with the power of careless genius the household of the _parvenu_ Trimalchio. Yet they have an equal scorn or detestation for the new man who was forcing his way from the lowest debasement of servile life to fortune and power. But the embittered man of letters, humiliated by poverty, yet brimful of Roman pride, avenges his ideals with a rougher, heavier hand than the Epicurean noble, who had joined in the “Noctes Neronis” with a delicate, scornful cynicism, who was too disillusioned, and too fastidiously contemptuous, to waste anger on what he despised.