If Cicero, the most tender-hearted of Roman public men, could urge the claims of the companies so strongly, and, as in this last letter, without any allusion to the interests of the province and its people, we may well imagine how others, less scrupulous, must have combined with the capitalists to work havoc in regions that only needed peace and mild government to recover from centuries of misery. Such a letter is the best comment we can have on the pernicious system of raising taxes by contract--a system which was to be modified, regulated, and eventually reduced to harmless dimensions under the benevolent and scientific government of the early Empire. We must now turn to the other department of the activity of the men of business, that of banking and money-lending (_negotiatores_). On the north or sunny side of the Forum we noticed in our walk round the city the shops of the bankers (_tabernae argentariae_). The _argentarii_ were originally, as their name suggests, only money-changers, a class of small business men that arose in response to a need felt as soon as increasing commerce and extended empire brought foreign coin in large quantities to Rome. The Italian communities outside the Roman State issued their own coinage until they were admitted to the civitas after the Social War,--a fact which alone is sufficient to show the need of men who made it their business to know the current value of various coins in Roman money; and as Rome became involved in the affairs of the East, there were always circulating in the city the tetradrachms of Antioch and Alexandria, the Rhodian drachmas, and the cistophori of the kings of Pergamus, afterwards coined in the province of Asia.[127] No doubt the money-changing business was a profitable one, and itself led to the formation of capital which could be used in taking deposits and making advances; and, as Professor Purser puts it,[128] the mere possession of a quantity of coin for purposes of change would be likely to develop spontaneously the profession of banking. In the same way the _nummularii_, or assayers of the coin, having a mass of it in their hands, would tend to develop a private business as well as their official public one. All these, argentarii or nummularii, might be called _foeneratores_, from the interest (_foenus_) which they charged in their transactions. The profession was a respectable one, for honesty and exactness in accounts were absolutely necessary to success in it.[129] If the reader will turn to Cicero's speech in defence of Caecina (6. 16), he will find these accounts appealed to, though apparently not actually produced in court; but in the _Noctes Atticae_ of Aulus Gellius (xiv. 2) a judge who is describing a civil case which came before him, mentions, among the documents produced, _mensae rationes_, i.e. the accounts kept by the banker.