the Antonines were less frequent and generous than in our own day. The duties of wealth, both in Greece and Rome, were at all times rigorously enforced by public opinion. The rich had to pay heavily for their honours and social consideration in the days of Cicero, and in the days of Symmachus, as they had in the days of Pericles.(1091) They had to contribute to the amusement of the people, and to support a crowd of clients and freedmen. In the remotest municipality, the same ambitions and the same social demands, as we shall show in the next chapter, put an enormous strain on the resources of the upper class. Men must have often ruined themselves by this profuse liberality. In the reign of Augustus a great patron had several times given a favourite freedman sums of £3000 or £4000. The patron’s descendant in the reign of Nero had to become a pensioner of the emperor. Juvenal and Martial reveal the clamorous demands by which the great patron was assailed.(1092) The motives for this generosity of the wealthy class were at all times mixed and various. But in our period, the growth of a pure humane charity is unmistakable, of a feeling of duty to the helpless, whether young or old. The State had from the time of the Gracchi taken upon itself the immense burden of providing food for a quarter of a million of the proletariat of Rome. But in the days of Pliny it recognised fresh obligations. The importance of education and the growth of poverty appealed powerfully to a ruling class, which, under the influence of philosophy, was coming to believe more and more in the duty of benevolence and of devotion to things of the mind. All the emperors from Vespasian to M. Aurelius made liberal provision for the higher studies.(1093) But this endowment of culture, which in the end did harm as well as good, is not so interesting to us as the charitable foundations for the children of the poor. It was apparently the emperor Nerva, the rigid economist who sold the imperial furniture and jewels to replenish the treasury,(1094) who first made provision for the children of needy parents throughout Italy. But epigraphy tells us more than literary history of the charity of the emperors. The tablet of Veleia is a priceless record of the charitable measures adopted by Trajan. The motive of the great emperor was probably, as his panegyrist suggests, political as much as benevolent.(1095) He may have wished to encourage the rearing of children who should serve in the armies of the State, as well as to relieve distress. The provision was even more evidently intended to stimulate agriculture. The landed proprietors of the place, to the number of forty-six, received on mortgage a loan from the State of about £10,000 in our money, at an interest of five per cent, which was less than half the usual rate of that time.(1096) The interest was appropriated to the maintenance of 300 poor children, at the rate of about £1:11s. a year for each male child, and £1 for each girl.