Money was easily made in those days and lavishly spent. Even an honest man like Cicero, governing a comparatively poor province like Cilicia, made at least £20,000 by his year of office while he remitted to the provincials a million, which, as he says, any governor of average morality would have retained. Legacies were a very frequent source of revenue especially to pleaders, and it was customary for a rich testator at Rome to make large bequests to his friends. Cicero gained £200,000 by such legacies. Foreign kings and states paid handsomely for legal advice or support. Although a barrister was supposed to give his services for nothing yet gifts and legacies were not refused. For the financier or business man there were many channels to affluence. There were mines all over the empire to be financed and exploited. Although there was little genuine industry at Rome, yet the training and use of slaves for various undertakings was a lucrative business. Crassus trained a salvage brigade for Rome and went about to fires with them in order to make bids for the purchase of the burning property. Atticus trained a company of copying clerks and made money by the sale of books. He also kept gladiators and hired them out to magistrates for the games. Fortunes were made, as in the case of Crassus, by buying up the confiscated property of the proscribed. Land speculation was rendered extremely profitable by the frequent assignation of farm-lands to veteran soldiers who were generally glad to sell them at once. The extravagance of the Roman nobles led to a very brisk traffic in loans at high interest. There was a great deal of genuine commercial speculation in ships and cargoes, generally by companies, and Cato advises the investor to put his money in fifty different enterprises rather than in one at a time. Commerce overseas was, however, forbidden to the senators by the Claudian law, and these speculated chiefly in land, on which they made a profit by slave-labour. But the most profitable business of all was tax-farming, in which the equestrian classes joined together in capitalist rings. In these and other ways prodigious fortunes were accumulated. The stored-up capital of the Roman world is astounding in its magnitude compared even to that of modern times. The real property of Pompeius sold for £700,000. Æsopus, the popular actor, left £200,000. After the most lavish donations to the public Crassus left nearly two millions sterling by will. On the death of Cæsar the treasury contained eight millions in bullion of which a million was the dictator’s own property.