gave up to pasture and cattle raising, as being more profitable and requiring less care than tilling the soil. Thus there was no employment or means of subsistence for poor freedmen in the country; and so they flocked to the cities, crowding the wretched _insulæ_, or tenements, and depending mainly upon the free distributions of corn for their living. The mass of the people, however, were drawn to Rome and the other great Italian cities as much by their desire to participate in the feverish life of the times as they were driven thither by lack of employment in the country. These were the people who amused Nero by fighting for places in the Great Circus; these were the people who howled for bread and for games, and rewarded an ample supply of the same by supporting tyrants in their monstrous excesses. When it is remembered that all domestic labor, as well as all work belonging to many other branches of industry, was performed by slaves, we are necessarily left to suppose that the proletariat of Rome had little with which to occupy itself beyond the public exhibitions and the pothouses, of which there existed an enormous number; great numbers of men were, however, required for the immense armies which garrisoned the provinces. Of the domestic life of the common people of Rome we have only the most meagre information. We know that they inhabited huge tenements, in which small apartments were rented at excessive rates. Housekeeping in these tenements must have been conducted on a very simple scale, as one of the comic writers pictures a poor family moving to other quarters and carrying all their effects in their hands at one journey. Yet the men who issued thence wore the _toga_ of the Roman citizen, tattered though it might be and having no other significance than the mere fact that its wearers were not slaves. For these men there was little occupation except wandering about the city in search of amusement and the opportunity to make a little gain by any means that came to hand. Of course, there were trades and commerce, the workshop and the store; but slavery made it impossible for a large proportion of the impecunious citizens of Rome to make an honorable living by means of their own labor. There was a larger army of the unemployed than our modern cities can show. Yet the Roman government, laying tribute as it did upon the whole civilized world, could keep the citizens of Rome from starving. For the women, beyond their simple domestic duties, the field of honest industry was yet more limited. They were employed as professional mourners to sing songs of lamentation at funerals; they could work at some few mechanical trades, such as cloth weaving; they could keep a shop. Occasionally, there was a woman of exceptional talent who made large profits by means of decorative art; among the wall pictures of Pompeii there is one which represents a female artist engaged in painting upon canvas a figure of Bacchus from a statue which serves her for a model.